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When she was mired in a seemingly endless drug addiction, Phyliss Sauvé couldn’t slog her way through the health care and social services systems that were intended to help her.

It was nearly impossible to make or keep appointments with doctors, drug counsellors and social workers when she had no home, no phone, no car. “You don’t see any way out, and I would get frustrated, so I would just keep doing what I was doing.”

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Today, after five years of sobriety, she works for the unique Rapid Access Addiction Clinic, or RAAC, at St. Paul’s Hospital, which offers most of the services addicts need to try to get clean, under one roof.

“If I would have been able to walk through these doors and have everything I need to access here and the help, all in one spot, I don’t think I would have struggled as much,” said Sauvé, a RAAC peer navigator. “It would have saved me a lot of grief. ”

RAAC opened in the fall of 2016 to divert people away from St. Paul’s overburdened emergency department, which over the previous five years had been hit with a 64 per cent increase in patients who use drugs. A public health emergency was declared in B.C. in 2016 because of the high number of people suffering overdoses while using opioids, which were often laced with the synthetic drug fentanyl.