Our team: Charlotte Boorman, Parineeta Vaid, Xiaodong Zhang, Zainib Nazir

As a team, we are dedicated to making a change in Hamilton, particularly in areas of health and safety throughout the city. We are passionate about creating safe and welcoming spaces for people that use drugs through non-clinical and non-stigmatizing settings, as a way of breaking the stigma surrounding drug-use. It is our goal to facilitate both a safe place for people to use drugs, but also to feel part of the community, as every voice and person is unique.  

Safe consumption sites (SCS) are vital services in our communities, particularly because the toxic street-level drug supply and inadequate drug policies create prevalent risks for community members. Hamilton paramedics receive approximately  19 calls per week   for situations involving opioids.  47,000 overdoses have been reversed   through the utilization of SCS's across Canada. It is pertinent to consider how we can make lifesaving services like this accessible and inclusive to all people who use substances. In Hamilton alone, drug poisonings resulting in death have  approximately tripled over the last decade , between 2013 and 2023, further expressing a need for accessible and welcoming SCS’s. Not only are SCS’s crucial, but creating SCS’s that are diverse and cater to various needs is also important. Many people come from different experiences, and SCS’s are not a ‘one-size fits all’ amenity. There are various factors that play a role in feelings of safety, such as experiences of gender-based violence; physical access, such as being located in harder to reach areas; and stigmatizations and hesitancy to utilize such services due to social or personal perceptions of such support systems. Our solution, “The Future of Safe Consumption Sites: Accessible Mobile Units” aims to break down barriers that people face when accessing safe ways to use substances. Mobile units aim to encompass all the ideal aspects of regular SCS’s, while being more physically accessible by expanding outreach to areas of the city that do not have such amenities. This project has been and will continue to be conducted in a co-designed approach with collaboration between our team members, community members, and those with lived experience, to ensure various perspectives and ideas are implemented.  

• Existing SCS can be inaccessible to residents both physically and socially.
• Women and gender diverse individuals are more likely to experience trauma and a lack of safety in co-ed programs and SCSs that do not cater to their experiences.
• Clinical settings and feelings of distrust deter individuals from accessing SCS.

We first structured our thinking around the question “How might we design safe consumption sites (SCS) in Hamilton to foster an inclusive and welcoming environment for people who use drugs?“ We created and directed our research based on four core questions that aimed to understand the benefits and implications of Safe Consumption Sites, how they operated, what needed to be improved, and how that could potentially be done. After completing said preliminary research and conversing with community members, one of our major conclusions was that there was a lack of accessibility for women and gender diverse indiviuduals for the exsiting Safe Consumption Sites. With that being said, we reframed our original to focus on our conclusion; “How might we implement a sociomedical approach at Safe Consumption Sites for women and non-binary individuals in Hamilton?”

1. Reduced adverse-drug effects and drug poisonings through quantitative analysis of data provided by the city of Hamilton
2. The observation of adequate use and receiving positive feedback, such as feelings of safety, regarding the mobile unit and its offered resources.

After further research, collaboration, and revision, we narrowed down our solution ideas to 2: Community based wellness SCS and mobile SCS units. We assessed the accessibility and inclusivity of each solution:

Select & swipe through our slides to see our assessment of the viability of our prototype solutions 1 & 2. We assessed the advantages, disadvantages, opportunities, and barriers of our solutions, under a financial, social, and environmental lens.

As a way of addressing these inequalities and advocating for people that use substances, we propose the future of safe consumption sites through the implementation of mobile units:

Each of us are passionate about supporting vulnerable and underserved populations and making the difference in the lives of the people in our community. We each come with our own stories, with friends experiencing struggles with substance use and a lack of support, or seeing how this is a need for our community in Hamilton. We wanted to take a sociomedical approach because social drivers of health are often overlooked or slip through the cracks in traditional medical models, and people's needs may not be met. It's an area that is often stigmatized and not talked about enough. We are hopeful that this solution can help address the stigma and provide an accessible space of safety and support to those that may need it.