Overdose crisis info sessions a success
Medicine Hat Public Library hosted its final overdose crisis information session last week, and chief librarian Ken Feser says they were successful in many ways.
For the first three Mondays of March the library hosted a number of speakers and invited Hatters to its theatre to learn about the overdose crisis and the community’s response.
“I think these were successful,” said Feser. “We had a pretty good turnout to all of them — the theatre was full, or close to full, for each of the sessions.
“We had lots of speakers from different agencies working in the community, and I think this was a good chance for us to put information into the community that may be hard for people to get otherwise.”
Feser says the events were not held to change people’s minds, but to help them get information so they can have informed opinions on the overdose crisis.
“There’s a number of agencies here in Medicine Hat working at this issue in a number of different ways,” he said. “For example, we had someone come in from the police and they talked about enforcement. We had someone from Alberta Health Services talking about treatment. We had another person talking about harm reduction.
“There’s four pillars people often talk about and we tried to cover that in all of our sessions.”
Feser says the public library has heard good things from people who attended the events.
“People are saying that there was good information,” he said. “In the first day we had people who had been impacted by the crisis personally and it was quite gut wrenching — there was actually a box of tissues circulating the theatre.
“The one thing I will add is that I think most of the people who came were sympathetic to the information we were presenting. I was hoping to see a bit more of both sides out, but I still think it went very well.”
Feser says the public library has hosted, and will continue to host information sessions on topics that may be hard for people to talk about.
“We did one about a year ago where we held sessions on vaccinations and the anti-vaccination side as well,” he said. “I think this is a place where people should be able to have conversations in the community even if it’s a hard subject — that’s a place we want to be.”