Community leaders are embracing a strategy to combat the Bartholomew County opioid crisis. It focuses on a coordinated treatment plan for victims, while placing a large emphasis on prevention.
The Alliance For Substance Abuse Progress in Bartholomew County, led by executive lead Jeff Jones, has spent the past year coming up with the plan, which was presented Wednesday night during a Community Report meeting at The Commons, attended by about 400 people.
Jones, a retired Cummins executive who volunteered to lead the ASAP effort a year ago, provided a recap of the organization’s first-year efforts and then had members of the ASAP team outline the system and strategy. It will bring a myriad of community resources together to help individuals and families struggling with opioid addiction.
Equally, if not more important, is a partnership announced with the Heritage Fund — The Community Foundation of Bartholomew County, which will administer the process of distributing $1 million to community programs focusing on preventing opioid addiction, Jones said.
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The money is from a challenge grant fund-raising process spearheaded by Mark and Wendy Elwood of Columbus, who asked the community to match their donation of $500,000 to fund what will be known as Project Prevent.
Tracy Souza, Heritage Fund president and CEO, lauded the Elwoods Wednesday night for their generous donation and also congratulated the community for donating the matching $500,000 in four and a half months, with 225 individuals, businesses and families donating to the cause.
“Our community has a remarkable record of making things happen and when we see something that needs to be fixed, we work together to fix it,” Souza said. “ASAP is a great example of that and so is the Elwood Fund for the Prevention of Substance Abuse.”
Defining the strategy
During Wednesday’s presentation, community leaders working on the ASAP project explained the critical elements of the strategy, including eight aimed at providing intervention, care, treatment and recovery support for people suffering from addiction.
“Like any good system, the elements must work well together. And while parts of this exist today, there are many gaps and inefficiencies,” Jones said.
ASAP is working to close the biggest gaps and to improve the effectiveness of the system, he said.
ASAP is also aware the system needs to be client-focused, given the complexity of the addiction issue, Jones said. Because of the need for individuals to receive assistance, a hub is being created, Jones said. The Hub is to be a resource center, an actual physical location, where people may connect to service providers and recovery support programs.
Jones cautioned that he was not implying in the presentation that the substance abuse support system being proposed will ever be perfect.
“There are a number of major gaps that will be extremely difficult to close, such as housing, and significant variables that are out of our control, like insurance or the lack of insurance,” he said.
Beth Morris, ASAP’s prevention leader, and Columbus Regional Health director of community health partnerships, said a partnership between Human Services Inc., Columbus Township and Centerstone has received a $300,000 grant to help people with rent expenses after they complete probation programs through Community Corrections following recovery from addiction.
Treatment plans and options
Updates were given Wednesday night on several new and ongoing initiatives that will expand in the coming year — one of the most significant being Columbus Regional Health’s plans to invest in an in-patient and out-patient, medical-assisted treatment program through Columbus Regional Hospital.
Dr. Kevin Terrell, ASAP physician lead and emergency room physician who is also CRH’s chief of staff-elect, reviewed overdose death statistics in Bartholomew County, saying 30 people died of a drug overdose 2017.
“That’s one every 12 days,” he said. “And that’s two and a half time more deaths than in 2016,” he said. “We’re working toward wiping out that trend. Seventy-five percent of people who use heroin started out with pain pills.”
Terrell said what hurt him personally is that victims may have gotten those pain pills from a well-meaning physician, eventually leading the patient to a heroin addiction. Most people don’t take the entire opioid prescription they have, and 60 percent of patients keep leftovers, he said. An estimated one in five people will share those pills with someone else, he said.
Terrell said he is working with four groups — including physician leaders in the emergency department, inpatient and hospital, outpatient and ambulatory and surgeons — to identify pain management protocols based on best practices and to alleviate suffering safely.
The pain management protocols will be placed in the hospital’s electronic medical record system and every doctor will have recommendations for how many opioid pills are appropriate for each patient, he said. The groups are also working with non-CRH physicians, dentists and oral surgeons to share the protocols.
Medical-assisted treatment for opioid addiction has been successful when combined with cognitive behavioral therapy, counseling, family support and support groups, Terrell said.
CRH is developing an addiction medicine specialty clinic which will combine all those elements, which could be up and running later this year, said Julie Abedian, ASAP treatment team leader and CRH vice president for community partnerships and corporate responsibility.
The hospital is also adding Centerstone Recovery coaches in its emergency department and hope to have the program begin next month and be fully operational this summer. The coaches are available for patients who need a peer to talk with when considering entering recovery to help them consider a new path for their lives, she said.
The hospital is also working on adding and integrated primary care/behavioral health practice which would involve medically managed withdrawal and induction treatment, she said. Some people refer to that process as detox.
When patients arrive at the hospital needing treatment, hospital officials want to have the resources to start them on their recovery immediately, she said.
“We want to have the right treatment at the right time at the right place,” she said.
New courts, different approach
Bartholomew Circuit Court Judge Kelly Benjamin, who leads the ASAP intervention team, talked about the new Family Recovery Court supervised by Magistrate Heather Mollo, which had its first family accepted this month, and the work toward establishing a problem-solving drug court.
In 2016, 436 children were listed as in need of services by Bartholomew County’s court system and the majority of those cases involved a drug-addicted parent, she said.
Members of the intervention team are visiting different problem-solving adult drug courts around the state with the hope of starting one in Bartholomew County during 2019, Benjamin said.
Benjamin said the team’s research showed that 75 percent of drug court graduates remained arrest-free two years after their cases went through the court. With a goal of reuniting families and repairing lives, the court’s focus is on rebuilding lives so individuals can re-enter the community rather than continue a cycle of repeated arrests and jail time.
The intervention team is working with Bartholomew County Sheriff Matt Myers in his efforts to place an evidence-based substance abuse treatment program inside the jail.
“But there is a very real issue of jail overcrowding that must be addressed,” Benjamin said. Bartholomew County officials are working with Myers to possibly reopen a closed portion of the jail to provide room for the treatment program and to alleviate overcrowding.
The team is also working with Columbus Police Chief Jon Rohde on a Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program designed to address low-level drug crimes.
As part of the overall ASAP program, Jones also introduced an aspirational theme for the next year, “We Know. We Can.”
The theme is meant to convey that the entire community is playing a part in fighting the opioid crisis and is capable of creating a high-performing substance abuse support system, despite the challenges, Jones said.
He asked the audience to consider what type of role each person might want to play, whether it is coming up with an idea for Project Prevent, volunteering through the Hub or coming up with a suggestion or innovative idea.
“This isn’t really just about the work,” Jones said of what the ASAP team has done in the past year, and what it hopes to accomplish in the second year. “It’s about our purpose. We want to help people in our beautiful community recover from this awful disease,” he said. “They are us and I know we can make a difference. We’re ready to go to work.”
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Read more information about the ASAP initiative today on Pages A6 and A7.
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