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Health unit getting up to $150,000 to reduce opioid-caused harm in Sarnia-Lambton

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Police, health agencies, school boards and others, spurred by the opioid crisis, have joined up to craft a strategy aimed at preventing overdose deaths in Sarnia-Lambton.

A group of more than 20 agencies met this week to talk about ways to intervene, said Lynn Laidler, executive director of the Rapids Family Health Team, noting she was spurred to act after reading about a fatal overdose in August likely caused by fentanyl-laced cocaine.

“I was sitting there and I got passionate, and when I get passionate I get angry a little bit,” she said. “So I decided we have to do more.”

According to Lambton Public Health, there were five Sarnia-Lambton deaths related to opioid poisoning in 2016, and 47 hospitalizations.

Opioids are powerful and addictive painkillers, including morphine, oxycodone, heroin and fentanyl – increasingly linked with overdose deaths across the country.

The Sarnia-Lambton group on Wednesday, Laidler said, talked about existing resources and gaps, making general plans to better educate youngsters about the harms opioid abuse can cause, expand access to naloxone – an injectable drug that can stave off an overdose before help arrives – and start keeping real-time statistics about opioid overdoses and emergency room visits.

“We need the community as a whole; we can’t do this on our own,” Laidler said.

Plans are to meet again in November, she said.

The group forming is timely, said Kevin Churchill, manager of health promotion with Lambton Public Health.

The health unit recently received harm-reduction funding from the provincial Health Ministry for similar strategies, he said.

“It was really good timing.”

The funding – up to $150,000 this year – is for surveillance, naloxone kit distribution, and to set up an opioid overdose response plan and drug strategy, he said.

The meeting “was really a jumping off point for that,” he said.

As far as surveillance, plans are to work with police, emergency responders and others to identify trends when drugs are causing overdoses on the street, and get the word out fast, he said.

“Then hopefully you can intervene … before too many people are affected.”

Naloxone kits are currently available through public health and certain pharmacies, he said – to anybody who takes a 15-minute training session – and plans are to train family health teams and community health centres to offer them as well.

“It can really reverse that overdose and save lives,” Churchill said about naloxone.

The funding is linked to a $222-million investment the Health Ministry announced in late August, to address the opioid crisis over three years.

More details about Sarnia-Lambton’s slice of $22 million in the first year is planned at an announcement at Bluewater Health on Friday, said Andrew Tompsett, an official with the Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network (LHIN). The organization controls health spending in Sarnia-Lambton, Chatham-Kent and Windsor-Essex.

It’ll take a few months to establish a database and start real-time monitoring of overdoses and emergency room visits, Churchill said.

“There’s a sense of urgency,” he said. “We’re going to try to move as quickly as we can.”

tkula@postmedia.com

 

BY THE NUMBERS

In Sarnia-Lambton, 2016:

21,405 residents prescribed opioids for pain

1,326 residents prescribed methadone/suboxone for addiction

165 opioid-related emergency department visits

47 opioid-poisoning-related hospitalizations

48 infants hospitalized for maternal drug addiction

5 opioid-poisoning-related deaths

– source: Lambton Public Health, via Rapids Family Health Team

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