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Lana Fox’s peers and colleagues were suffering from the trauma of losing clients from the Downtown Eastside to the opioid overdose crisis. Thanks to JIBC’s Critical Incident Stress Management program, she learned how to help. (Story by Wanda Chow / Photo by Jimmy Jeong)
Lana Fox was working at the Portland Hotel Society in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside when she noticed her peers and colleagues were suffering.
Her role involved supporting clients with mental health and addictions issues through housing, safe injection and other programs. But before the opioid overdose epidemic made national news headlines and was declared a public health emergency, there was already an obvious change.
“I saw a definitive increase in the trauma being suffered by my peers,” Lana said. “They were attending significantly more overdoses and having increased negative outcomes. Our tenants and program participants were dying at an alarming rate.”
Wanting to help support her colleagues and community, she enrolled in the Critical Incident Stress Management Certificate (CISM) program at the Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC).
She found all of her courses were applicable to life in general, citing emergency preparedness as one area she learned new tools that will prove useful one day. The program included simulated debriefings conducted with professional actors to help students practice what they learned.
“Throughout the coursework, it was very easy to imagine how the practice could be applied to my workplace.”
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