CT_March-April_2022_Mag_Web

Health Care Special Session & Luncheon

“As a result, treatment relies on behavioral in- terventions which can be time consuming, require special training and intense follow up and is often limited by attrition, retention issues and from financial and payment challenges.’ he noted. Jones went on to describe several challenges for those dealing with this population: “Individuals who use both stimulants and opioids are more likely to be homeless, have more social challenges and needs for services, to inject drugs daily or more than once a day, to reuse or share syringes, and to report a nonfatal overdose in the past year and to have suboptimal treatment outcomes,” he observed. He went on to recommend some resources for clinical treatment including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) treatment guide on stimulant treat- ment which focuses on motivational interviewing, contingency management, community reinforce- ment approach and cognitive behavioral therapy. “It walks through the evidence base and how you might implement this in practice. It is a good resource for people who have been focusing on opioid treatment through medication and now all of a sudden we have this new population we need to address,” he stated.

“Recognizing the populations we are most concerned about; those at highest risk are the populations you are engaging with every day.” “Not only how do we prevent acute overdoes but how do we address the underlying causes trauma, exposure to violence, adverse childhood experiences there are upstream factors we can think about as a community to address that should have a payoff for you down the road and have a payoff for public health as well.” According to Jones, giving funding to local levels provides an opportunity to try innovative solutions. “Some have focused on medication for opioid use disorder in the criminal justice population or looking at reentry or linkage to care. How do we look at these sort of intractable issues or people falling through the cracks and what can public health bring to the table to help address those issues. A lot of our community level funding is go- ing to those innovations at the local level and how do we scale that up.” Finally, he concluded the talk by encouraging the assembly to join with these innovative ways to deal with the overdose crisis. “Trying to recognize we need new and inno- vative tools in our toolkit because the numbers are not going where we want them to go,” he concluded.

2022 Winter Conference He moved on to describe how the CDC has worked with ACA for a while and increasingly provides funding to state health departments and county and city departments.

— Kirk Raymond

54 — May/June 2022 Corrections Today