Near real-time opioid overdose data provided by the System for Opioid Overdose Surveillance (SOS), gives stakeholders in Kent County access to a breadth of information that helps facilitate the implementation of new and enhanced opioid overdose response and prevention efforts. Through our focus groups and one-on-one interviews with stakeholders, we compiled a list of five recommendations for strengthening data-driven opioid overdose response efforts in Kent County that may impact stakeholders and their ability to respond and prevent opioid overdoses.
The Kent County Opioid Task Force (KCOTF) is a unique group with the goal to bring the overdose response and prevention community in Kent County together. Using this resource is vital to strengthening community collaboration in Kent County. With equal access to near real-time suspected overdose data, community stakeholders involved in KCTOF and beyond can develop new community-based overdose response strategies and cohesively respond to overdose in their community. Equal access to a shared data source can ease cross-organizational miscommunication and bring community organizations together in their efforts to prevent overdose.
Accessing near real-time suspected overdose data provides community stakeholders the opportunity to focus their overdose response and prevention efforts in jurisdictions that experience a high burden of overdose. Stakeholders aim to decrease the burden of overdose in these regions through targeted overdose response and harm reduction techniques, such as increased naloxone distribution, deployment of mobile response units, and increased awareness and education efforts.
Stigma persists as a great barrier facing stakeholders in Kent County. This barrier affects stakeholders across all sectors, making effective overdose response and prevention more difficult. Using data to raise community awareness of the extent of opioid overdose is one way stakeholders can work to reduce community stigma. Near real-time data can also be used to identify regions of high overdose burden where stigma may be particularly high. Through this identification, organizations can more effectively identify where stigma reduction efforts need to be prioritized.
Finite resources and a lack of funding present a challenge to stakeholders across all sectors in the community. In each sector, there are initiatives or programs that lack adequate funding, with staff stretched thin and long waitlists for provided services. Suspected overdose data can be used in funding proposals to demonstrate the heavy burden of opioid overdose and demonstrate the need for increased funding.
Opioid overdose data can be presented to organizational leadership and local or state officials to provide evidence of the extent of overdose in the community and support the need for effective overdose response and prevention efforts (e.g., harm reduction techniques). Leadership support is imperative in making long-lasting change, and can be used by policymakers and legislators to inform local, state, and federal policies aimed at decreasing fatal and non-fatal overdose.
Conclusion
With the introduction of a near real-time fatal and non-fatal opioid overdose surveillance system that provides geographic data for each incident, it is our hope that community stakeholders across the state of Michigan will use the system in their own communities to develop and implement best-fit strategies such as those described above. Future work should be done to evaluate these data-driven responses and to establish data-driven legislative policies that will work to end the opioid epidemic.