Wendy Muckle retiring as head of Ottawa Inner City Health

After 21 years of leading Ottawa Inner City Health, Wendy Muckle is retiring as executive director.

"I am feeling good, I think it is time for a change," Muckle tells CTV News Ottawa. "I always worried about staying too long. When you are the co-founder of an organization, it is hard to really start to think about how that organization is going to go on without you. I feel like the organization is in a good place and it is a good time to make that change."

After starting her career as a nurse in the 1980s, Muckle has worked with the homeless population since 1990 with the City of Ottawa and the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre. Muckle co-founded Ottawa Inner City Health (OICH) in 2001 after she saw a need for more services dealing with homelessness in the downtown area.

“When Inner City Health started, we were really in the middle of an AIDS crisis, and homeless people were literally dying on the streets from AIDS on the street. It was a really challenging situation," Muckle says.

"The community really came together, we truly transformed the face of that disease, we haven’t had anyone die of AIDS in our community for a very long time. That was the beginning of us figuring out that us as a community we could tackle these complicated together and we could make changes."

OICH provides services for the city’s most vulnerable, including those suffering from drug addiction. The services include harm reduction strategies like supervised consumption sites, providing legal and safe drug supplies.

Muckle has been at ground zero of Ottawa’s opioid and toxic street drug crisis.

"Over the years, the penny drops and you realize the problems that we have are really because of the inequities in our society," Muckle said. "And as soon as we figure out how to fix something, there is a new group of people who are falling out of the social safety net in our community and that work of figuring things out is never done."

Muckle has been at the forefront of the fight to have harm reduction strategies in Ottawa. There are four safe injection sites in the city, including at the Shepherds of Good Hope on Murray Street, known as The Trailer. In the month of September, there were roughly 6,600 visits to the site, and more than 7,200 in the month of August.

"The most recent years, the opioid crisis that we now call toxic street drug poisoning crisis that has definitely been more difficult than anything we have ever faced," Muckle says. "The pandemic made everything worse, it made drug use worse, it made toxic drug supply worse, it made overdose deaths worse. It has decimated the mental health of that community; it has pushed us down and it is not getting better.”

According to data from the federal government, the number of opioid-related deaths climbed in 2021, with a total of 7,560 opioid-related deaths. While the average number of opioid-related deaths per day was eight in 2016, this number more than doubled, reaching an all-time high of 21 per day in 2021.

In July, Ottawa Public Health sent out a warning, after a rise in drug overdoses with five deaths in one week. In August, there were 65 opioid overdose emergency department visits, according to OPH data.

OPH data also shows that in 2021 there were 138 opioid overdose-related deaths in Ottawa. The most recent data collected for 2022 reflects the first four months, with 29 overdose-related deaths.

However, OPH says overdose data is “an underestimate of the true health burden of overdoses because we know that many people who have non-fatal overdoses do not call 911 or seek medical treatment through the emergency department."

Muckle says, "The drugs are horrible, and they get worse, every time we start to get use to what is happening, the supply chain changes and get worse. The drugs get stronger and more toxic the combinations get worse."

Muckle says many clients to the site are “polysubstance users", meaning they use alcohol, stimulants, or opioids, and that combination is difficult to respond to.

Rob Boyd, who runs the Oasis Program at Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, will take over for Muckle this month.

Boyd says, "What Wendy and the team have created here with the programs across the city are so big and so important to this community."

He calls his new role "very humbling", and takes it “very seriously."

Boyd has been an advocate for harm reduction strategies – including safe injection sites in Ottawa.

"As someone who has worked alongside (Muckle), to just watch the way that things work, and the responsiveness and the quickness that things have happened and the constant pivoting," Boyd said.

He agrees that the pandemic has had a devastating effect on the toxic drug crisis in Ottawa.

"Things have really changed. When we were doing our advocacy for supervised consumption sites, and it was Oxycontin that was the drug we were worried about; and so really, we have had the drug supply do a runaround us in terms of what the response should be," Boyd said.

"The things we had in place are no longer the things that we need anymore. We need to start looking at different ways at addressing that problem, through things like safe supply. We need to rethink how we are doing things because we are no longer keeping up with the wave of change that is happening out there."

Boyd says the challenge for public health services and community supports is staying ahead of the ever-changing street drug supplies.

"I think it is trying to stay ahead of the wave and recognizing what we can do and our position. The reality, there is so much that is overwhelming us right now and we are not going to fix this problem really quickly and really easily, and so we also have to witness people suffering and the loss that is happening."