Author: Samira Prasad

Dr. Samuel Law spoke with TVO for a story about Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams, which are considered the gold standard for mental health care. Law talked about how the pandemic impacted the ACT teams he works on, how allied professionals and clients’ families and friends helped to close care gaps during the pandemic, and how a study from St. Michael’s showed that despite efforts, people with mental health issues had significant struggles during lockdowns.

Lucie Richard and Dr. Stephen Hwang spoke with The Globe and Mail about their recently published study that shows the mandating of coding for homelessness in hospitals helped identify about one in two homeless patients, more than double the number before the policy update.

Karen McDonald gave CTV a look into MAP’s Drug Checking Service. On the front lines of Toronto’s opioid epidemic, the team check and report on the city’s drug supply in an effort to combat the overdose crisis.

In this podcast from CMAJ, Dr. Darrell Tan describes the regimen of the newly approved long-acting injectable for pre-exposure prophylaxis and as a treatment for HIV.

MAP scientist Dr. Archna Gupta found that patients in Ontario were typically better off being in close proximity to their family doctors. The further away they lived, the less likely they were to be screened for cancer and the more likely they were to visit the emergency department for non-urgent health concerns. Dr. Gupta recently spoke with The Globe and Mail about these findings.

Dr. Dan Werb‘s collabortive work with Dr. Dan Beriault and Dr. Drew Hall on a new drug checking device, DoseCheck, was recently featured in U of T news. The device will be low cost to produce and can give results in just 45 seconds. It won’t have the range of a mass spectrometer, which is the gold standard, but it will detect the most common substances found. It will help fill in the gaps in current harm reduction methods by making testing more accessible.

Hayley Thompson of MAP’s Drug Checking Service recently spoke with CTV News about the increase of xylazine and other tranquilizers showing up in Toronto street drugs. While naloxone can reverse the effects of fentanyl on a person experiencing an overdose, it cannot negate the dangerous effect of the tranquilizers, which are being added to the drugs.

Dr. Tara Gomes recently spoke with TVO about her recent report that identified that the rate of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario’s shelter system more than tripled during the pandemic. The study showed that 90 percent of those who died had sought help for a mental health related condition. “This is a population with a high complexity of needs,” says Dr. Gomes, “and we’re clearly not finding the best ways to support them.”

MAP recently launched Our Healthbox, a harm reduction vending machine, at Brantford’s SOAR Community Services office. Dr. Sean B. Rourke, project lead, shared with The Brantford Expositor that “everyone in Canada deserves to have what they need, when they need it, to take care of their health, but we know this is not the case, so we are doing everything we can to bridge that gap in ways that work for each person in their community.”

The Ontario government is downgrading COVID-19 from a novel coronavirus to a “disease of public health significance,” limiting the kind of data that needs to be reported to, and by, medical officers of health. Dr. Andrew Pinto is quoted in this coverage by Politics Today. “It’s that balance of, while we’re reducing data in one area, do we have it in another source? And I would say that wastewater surveillance was both fairly cheap for the amount of information we got and also provided us a system that could be quickly scaled up in a new pandemic,” he said.