A.G. Gancarski
The city of Jacksonville passed a six-month pilot program for opioid treatment last week — and the program, which could help 600 addicts, can’t get going soon enough.
As of Jun. 21, Northeast Florida has seen 1,562 rescue transports for overdoses … a number very near the 1,739 in all of 2015.
The year 2016 saw 3,017 transports, indicating the timeframe of the crisis taking root.
The hospital with the most traffic: UF Health’s main campus on 8th Street.
331 overdose victims have gone there so far this year, delineating a possible reason for the hospital’s reluctance to be the primary E.R. for overdose victims; after all, the safety net hospital already bears the impact of many of these calls.
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The aforementioned treatment pilot, intended to address the mounting body count from fentanyl and derivatives, would see a local emergency room used as a feeder for two in-patient treatment programs, which would (at least in theory) help some of Jacksonville’s addicts beat the habit.
Gateway and River Region would be the in-patient facilities; UF Health will be involved to aggregate data, and a competitive process will determine the ER facility that would feed them (likely, St. Vincent’s in Riverside).
The program includes the following: residential treatment; outpatient services; medication costs, physician fees; access to medical and psychiatric treatment; and urine fentanyl test strips.
Factors such as reduction of recidivism, relapse, and other indicators will be metrics of success — key, given that one of the pervasive impacts is repeated emergency calls involving the same users, sometimes multiple times in a day.
Drug testing, early and often, will be a hallmark of the program — covering all substances of abuse and analogues thereof, including fentanyl and carfentanil.
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In May, Jacksonville was visited by Sen. Bill Nelson, who showed up at UF Health to call attention to the youngest victims of the crisis — newborns grasped by withdrawal as they struggle for their earliest breaths.
“Politics is getting in the way of care for babies,” Nelson said. “The poor child, through no fault of its own, is born addicted.”
“It’s another symptom of our times. We have a lot of opioid addiction. It has become a pandemic,” Nelson said, noting that 2,000 babies in Florida yearly are born “addicted because the mothers are addicted.”
Without federal Medicaid money, which is still a question given President Donald Trump‘s zeal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Nelson noted that there was no possible solution.
