Renew, Restore, Revive Riverview

A letter from last year:   Differing views on riverview
       Letter to the editor from Jenny Farley

YEAR IN REVIEW: Riverview Hospital

This is IMPORTANT :    Illustrated Ideas – Your turn to rate the features
you are presented with numerous panels, and you are asked to rate the concepts presented. This information will be used to generate a report due sometime this spring. Last call for comments in January 16, 2015

The highlight of last year was the reopening of the Hillside building and the Brookside building
See the details from a previous post

Apparently people have been seen going inside Valleyview 300, the specialized geriatric care building, that has been shut now for a few years, a crime to humanity that was.

Also word is that the Unit 8  ( the large concrete building near the cemetery ) is to be knocked down, unknown if anything will rise from the space vacated by its demise.  Surprised that this building is being demolished, it is made almost entirely of reinforced concrete, and looks more like a bomb shelter, then a hospital ward that held up to 100 patients at one time.

Hillside building

Brookside Building

Rich Coleman has an epiphany

Some mental health services to return to Riverview hospital, minister says
Rich Coleman says province will finalize a plan in the spring
                                        Mental-health plans for Riverview site
                                                 Coquitlam mayor optimistic over Riverview plans


UPDATE: (Dec 17 )  Known about this for months, finally an "official" press release.
First for B.C. recovery program helps addiction and mental illness

[ The "First for B.C.,..." statement is not true at all. ]

B.C.'s old Riverview Hospital to offer substance-abuse, mental-health programs

 40 beds? Too few, says MLA Robinson

Riverview services welcomed by mayor

[ actually only 14 new beds, the other 26 are just being transferred.  I heard one advocate from the Vancouver area stating that at the minimum 300 NEW beds are needed to deal with these multi-issue patients ]

 Dec. 23:  Man allegedly phoned in threat to kill VPD officer because he wanted mental health help
No charges laid in Sunday incident in crowded shopping area.
[ Sadly this cry for help in this fashion would frequently end badly, with some even more psychotic, paranoid police officer ending the patients misery. Hope the fellow gets his wish and is treated properly.   ]

     ☃     ☮  Happy Holidays  ☮     ☃

Coquitlam mayor optimistic over Riverview plans

Coquitlam mayor optimistic over Riverview plans

Illustrated Ideas for Riverview hospital

Well after a long wait the third round of  ideas and concepts, generated at the RenewingRiverview event has been placed online, for the public to comment on, apparently until mid-January.

Think  Art Therapy for the public.

 Have a look at the pages, and click away. ( Warning, very slow to load )

  Illustrated Ideas – Your turn to rate the features!
       
       There are 47 images to rate. These images came about from ideas put forward
by the participants in the break-out groups.

      There was actually other boards with artworks created prior, and during the event, that were also rated by the public as a whole at the event; they appear to NOT be shared online with the public.
Would have been nice to see those also shared with the public.

One observation is that nearly everything presented as an idea at the event was not new to the site in any way; most of the concepts had been fully integrated into the programs that were presented in the past at Riverview.  The only "new" concept was the idea of creating homes, on the site for the public; something which has always been greatly discouraged.  It is public land, not freehold.

 Other news:

Riverview confronts homelessness    [ Misleading headline ]

      The system for the mentally ill in B.C. is failing our families, advocate says.;
Brian Whitlock, diagnosed as mentally ill, isn’t the first case of a child apparently turning against their parent.
( some of the pro's would know that killers frequently started out killing animals first; so there is nothing new here. )

How does it work? CBT vs anti-depressants    CBT, being Cognitive behavioral therapy

Interesting letter/Column to the local paper:   COLUMN: Everyone deserves access to high-quality health care

Coquitlam mayor optimistic over Riverview plans

Art project

Art project focuses on Riverview Hospital patients
Through the grapevine I heard that there was a lot of material around, and that people were struggling with what to do with the patients effects; do you hide it away? or should it be shared freely?

Another ongoing project Lest WE Forget , documenting the people who served in the  Tri-Cites area, which of course includes Riverview.

[NOTE: I have been very busy, and recently hospitalized, so this project is taking shape slower than I would have liked it to; I have all of the information; it is just a tedious process to set it up as webpages. The Riverview Cemetery project is also slowly moving along;(nearly half-way through ) recently found another potential source of information Orders-in-Council  which sometimes give information about some of the people buried there.]

Long-missing patients

I am sure that there are more than these two patients missing; must be some from many years ago. The annual reports used to average around six to ten missing; some they thought probably just crossed the border, and were never heard from again; since the patients had ties to the U.S.A.

The local RCMP is looking for information about these six missing people, two of which were Riverview hospital patients, ( I actually thought that Linda Stephen, had been found. Damn secret medical community, not giving the public ALL of the tools needed to enable a safe recovery of these patients. This woman should have, and could have been found fairly easily using todays technology.  )

 File No. 2001-30232 Kenneth Sanford would be in his 70s now, after he went missing from Riverview Hospital on Aug. 1, 2001. The 59 year old had previously wandered away from the hospital but was found by staff members watching cars in the area. He wore full dentures and had a glass eye. A search of the hospital grounds by search and rescue teams turned up nothing. He had been homeless in the past and suffered from both mental and medical illnesses.

 File No. 2011-9427 Linda Stephen was last seen on the grounds of Riverview Hospital at 9:30 a.m. on April 8, 2011. Details of the 58-year-old’s case were fanned out to other police agencies in the area, but she was nowhere to be found.


 A different idea for Coquitlam's Riverview Hospital grounds
Another maybe well-meaning idea to populate the Riverview Hospital grounds, with a mix of "normal" and mentally ill people; sadly the "normal" people will not buy into it; especially the growing demographic that is prevalent in south-western British Columbia will not want anything to do with the concept. (pers. obs.)