The roots of The Wellness Navigation Project can be traced back to the fall of 2022, as Marc Roskamp prepared to take over the helm at the St. Thomas Police Service.
“From a public safety perspective,” noted Roskamp, “I believe so strongly in the health of the community and its citizens. And one of my main priorities will also be to build up the resiliency of our members of the police family.
“I’ve said this before, if we’re healthy on the inside, we will be healthy on the outside to deliver services to the community.”
Four years later, that emphasis on the well-being of both sworn and civilian members of the St. Thomas Police Service was recognized when what evolved into The Wellness Navigation Project under the leadership of St. Thomas native Dr. Kym Briggs and Chief Roskamp was honoured by Blue Line Magazine as one of the Top 10 policing feature stories of 2025.
Blue Line is Canada’s national law enforcement magazine.
In an interview after the Blue Line recognition Briggs observed, “Millions of dollars have been dedicated to mental health across the province and country. And unfortunately, first responders are struggling at a rate greater than the general public.
Briggs continue “And so we need to come up with some different solutions.
“We’re trying to teach the people of the organization, the leaders of the organization, to recognize mental health symptomology early, but also make the avenues to support more accessible.”
“It’s important that first responders hold it together in the moment of a call, that the public needs them to kind of be firm and there for people who need them, and so the problem is when they leave those calls, they often hold it in.
“What we’re trying to get the organization more comfortable with is responding to mental health when you’re reacting, rather than being injured or ill, and so we’re trying to teach the people of the organization, the leaders of the organization, to recognize mental health symptomology early, but also make the avenues to support more accessible.
“And that’s one thing that’s coming in St. Thomas is we’re offering workshops to all the family members for first responders with the St. Thomas Police Service, so that they can better support their loved one when they run into trouble.”
“I spent many, many hours, weeks, months, interviewing, surveying, talking to people. And so they really connected to the project, and all of the information and the ideas came from them.
“We’ve conducted surveys and interviews, focus groups. We’ve run educational workshops to collect a lot of really good information so that the changes that we make are rooted in the experience of the people who work there.
“And they’re the things that are most important to them. And with that information, we’ve put together a multi-year strategy to hopefully continue having this great impact.”
Briggs stresses that the success of the Wellness Navigation Project is driven by the members of the St. Thomas Police Service.
What does the Wellness Navigation Project look like inside the police station at 45 CASO Crossing?
Briggs continued, “It normalizes walking through the mental health door, if you will. And so what we’ve done is we’ve aligned with really great counsellors who are trauma-specific, first responder-specific counsellors. Who already see many of the people who work there.
“And so I connected with counsellors who were already trusted. And we worked to bring them right into the building just to make access easier, and then to normalize that experience of going to counselling and having appointments routinely.”
The seed for how police services across the country might address mental well-being going forward was planted right here at the St. Thomas Police Service with the cultivation of The Wellness Navigation Project.
Written by Ian McCallum
