This section of the toolkit was developed using information gathered through interviews and focus groups with public health stakeholders, who represent those working to impact health at the community level.
Below you will find promising overdose response strategies identified by public health stakeholders in Genesee County. Each promising strategy is numbered, along with stakeholder identified barriers to accomplishing the proposed strategy, and how the System for Opioid Overdose Surveillance (SOS) may assist stakeholders’ ability to accomplish each promising strategy.
Promising Strategy 1: Directing Prevention and Response
Public health stakeholders in Genesee County act as a neutral convener to bring together a wide group of community-based organizations and volunteers. These partnerships are vital to their functioning, operating as “boots-on-the-ground” individuals and groups working to distribute naloxone, engage with the community as peer recovery coaches and distribute educational materials.
An important component of overdose response and prevention work for public health stakeholders and their community is the identification of locations that are in the greatest need of overdose prevention and response. Through combined targeted response and partner engagement, overdose prevention and response can more effectively be tailored to each unique location requiring additional support. One public health stakeholder states, “The ability to look at zip code data is really important. That’s something that we utilize a lot for various programs, and I think, at least in our community, we know that there are specific zip codes that may be more problematic than others just based on various factors.” This stakeholder expresses the importance of access to location-specific overdose data and how the sharing of the data can help them bolster connections between themselves and their partner programs.
Barriers to Directing Prevention and Response
Public health stakeholders in Genesee County express the need for more timely data in order to target their response effectively. The ability to access timely death from overdose rates or toxicology reports is often nonexistent. These data sources take extended amounts of time to populate and are not particularly useful for timely overdose response.
Near Real-time Data Impact on Directing Prevention and Response
Currently the SOS dashboard and reports are being used by public health stakeholders to keep them informed on the extent of suspected opioid overdoses in the community and to direct their “boots-on-the-ground” partners to locations in greater need of response or support. Stakeholders described several ways that the SOS data has proven to be valuable:
- Target education: Public health stakeholders have been able to determine specific locations to distribute their educational materials through the use of SOS, connecting with the communities that need services the most. Engagement with these communities can be challenging and building trust through connections to resources is important in not only preventing overdose, but also in communicating the many support services available to those currently using opioids.
- Expand deployment of peer recovery coaches: Public health stakeholders use SOS to expand the deployment of peer recovery coaches to not only emergency departments but to community locations with high suspected overdose incidents to better facilitate accessibility.
Using SOS data, locations for educational materials, resource allocation, and focused response are more easily identified, with the intention to expand reach of these resources and further enhance community relationships.
“One of the biggest blanket statement public health things I’ve noticed is we are never as successful when we expect people to come to us.”
Public Health Stakeholder
Promising Strategy 2: Increasing Community Awareness
Public health stakeholders in Genesee County feel strongly that resources should be used to communicate the troubling trend of opioid overdose in the county. Stakeholders want the extent and impact of overdoses occurring to be a present concern for community members, while also emphasizing a need to educate without causing fear.
Stakeholders discuss the importance of awareness in order to secure resources and funds for overdose response. Without adequate funding, response to overdose does not have the necessary impact or reach. Stakeholders express the need for a data source to help them tell the story of what is occurring in their community and to give proof to the extent and seriousness of the issue of overdose in Genesee County.
Barriers to Increasing Community Awareness
Public health stakeholders recognize that the greatest barrier to prevention remains stigma and the misunderstanding of opioid use disorder. Stakeholders express the concern that people often have a negative or incorrect perspective of who is using opioids, how opioid use disorder can develop, and where overdose is occurring. Many community members may not want to recognize that it is affecting their community or someone they know. This makes it difficult to build community support and disseminate resources to the locations that need it most.
Near Real-Time Data Impact on Increasing Community Awareness
With the use of SOS, public health stakeholders plan to identify ways to support data-driven communications and educational materials:
SOS can help school districts understand and acknowledge the scope of the problem: Stakeholders discuss engaging with school districts to educate them on the opioid use and opioid overdose in their community using SOS data. Disseminating educational materials in a focused response to school districts that may be dealing with the issue of opioid use but are unsure of how to handle the situation in a school setting helps bring awareness to the issue. Stigma is decreased when community members recognize that opioid-related problems are not segregated to specific demographics or areas, as shown by unbiased, timely, data.
SOS helps secure funding by showing the severity of the issue in Genesee County: Public health stakeholders suggest that SOS data can be used in grant applications to support the ongoing need for funds and resources in the community. There is great value in demonstrating the acute need for additional resources through near-real time SOS data. Data provided by SOS can be used to reinforce to the community and to public health partners the prevalence of opioid overdose. In a similar sense, public health stakeholders believe the data populated by SOS will be useful for community education, stigma reduction, and in acquiring funds for community operations regarding opioid overdose.
“With the school districts we’ve observed there’s a fair amount that don’t want to acknowledge that there’s any sort of problem associated with drugs in their community, and so this is actually a really great tool to be able to provide them because it’s not like we want them to be wrong, but we want them to be realistic about what’s happening in their community.”
Public Health Stakeholder
Impacts of COVID-19 on Public Health Response
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health stakeholders experienced challenges in providing services. Some organizations had trouble maintaining staff either due to stay-at-home orders, or due to unemployment benefits offering staff greater financial stability than their job. The stay-at-home order also prevented engagement between public health stakeholders and the community. Stakeholders struggled to communicate with those in need of services, but who were unable to leave their home. Finally, public health stakeholders had to transfer most of their meetings or regular programming to videoconferencing format (e.g., Zoom). The COVID-19 pandemic required both public health stakeholders, as well as the community in which they work, to adapt to these barriers.