COVID-19 and Mental Health (CMH) Initiative: Research
Evaluation of innovative risk mitigation services in the context of dual crises of COVID-19 and overdose among people who use opioids in Vancouver, BC
Key Messages
- COVID-19 and associated public health measures have provided significant challenges to addressing the opioid-involved overdose crisis in the province.
- Proposed research seeks to evaluate two innovative emergency measures that were introduced in March to address the dual crisis of COVID-19 and overdose in BC: expanded opioid agonist therapy (OAT) prescription services and pandemic prescribing.
- The project aims to characterize uptake and barriers to accessing these two interventions, as well as provide a preliminary evaluation of health and social impacts of the interventions among people who use opioids.
Lay Summary
- We engaged key stakeholders in the community to develop our questionnaire.
- In addition to the existing knowledge users in our team, we formed partnerships with the BC Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction to work collaboratively on our project.
- We began to administer the questionnaire in December 2020 as planned and we have so far completed 300 interviews.
- The parent cohort studies (which our project is building on) have completed over 1200 phone interviews since July 2020 and will provide preliminary data.
- We plan to conduct preliminary data analysis in February and publish a periodical report starting in March 2021.
Author(s)
- Nominated Principal Applicant: Kanna Hayashi, Simon Fraser University
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(External links)
Population
People Who Use Drugs (PWUD) and Substance Use
Language
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