- A new program in Delaware will create patient outreach to patients recovering from an opioid overdose.
- Motivational interviewing is a patient engagement strategy that focuses on leading patients to healthy lifestyle decisions.
Christiana Care Health System and New Castle County in Delaware have created a patient outreach program to help connect patients recently treated for opioid overdose with patient education and access to other behavioral health services.
The partnership, titled the Community Substance Overdose Support Program, targets patients right after discharge from the emergency department . Community SOS leverages behavioral health experts and patient outreach and navigation professionals to connect with the patient at home following discharge. This program requires patient consent, the organizations wrote in a statement.
This program comes as a part of Christiana Care’s efforts to address the growing opioid crisis, according to the health system’s president and CEO Janice E. Nevin, MD, MPH.
“The opioid crisis has claimed tens of thousands of lives across the nation, and it continues to ravage families here in our community,” Nevin wrote in a statement. “To solve it, we need to work in new ways together. We know, through our breakthrough work in Project Engage, that when we reach patients in a reachable moment during a hospitalization, we can help them out of addiction and back into a healthy life. This new partnership will enable us to take this successful model out into the community, to reach more individuals and more families with the help and expertise that they need to break the cycle of addiction.”
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To begin, Christiana Care and New Castle County will support a two-person engagement team. With a $500,000 investment on the part of Christiana Care, this engagement team will use motivational interviewing to better engage patients in the addiction recovery process.
Motivational interviewing is a patient engagement strategy that focuses on leading patients to healthy lifestyle decisions, and has been proven effective specifically in behavioral health and substance abuse treatment, Christiana Care representatives explained.
The team will also employ family education and engagement strategies to integrate family members into the patient care team. The Community SOS program calls for providers to equip family members or cohabitants of overdose patients with Naloxone (Narcan), a drug that can help revive patients in the event of opioid overdose.
These efforts come alongside Christiana Care’s opioid treatment strategies, which include a withdrawal unit and the nationally-recognized Project Engage. Project Engage, as Nevin pointed out above, recognizes that the best place to engage a patient in healthy decision-making is in the healthcare facility. Christiana Care facilities are equipped with the proper resources to target and engage patients with opioid misuse disorder.
“The good news is that as health care professionals, we have evidence-based tools that work to help people pull themselves out of addiction,” said Erin Booker, LPC, corporate director of Behavioral Health at Christiana Care. “This partnership with New Castle County creates important collaboration with emergency responders who know the community well, and who often struggle with saving lives time after time from overdoses, too often knowing that it will happen again if that patient doesn’t receive extra help. This partnership provides that help with the important component of an engagement specialist who is a peer and has been through the process of fighting addiction.”
Opioid misuse is a major public health issue across the country. In Delaware, the issue impacts people at a disproportionate rate. The state had the second highest percentage change for suspected opioid overdose ED visits, increasing by 105 percent between 2016 and 2017.
Nearly 75 percent of those suspected overdose-related ED visits came from New Castle County, according to CDC statistics. ED overdose visits increased in New Castle County from 189 in the third quarter of 2016 to 464 during the same time period of 2017.
“This is the public health emergency of this generation,” said Matthew S. Meyer, New Castle County Executive. “Leadership requires that we intelligently identif y gaps in care and act collaboratively and quickly to address such gaps. Today is about doing just that.”
Date: March 16, 2018