Giving Compass' Take:
- Heather Chapman highlights research from The Pew Charitable Trusts that shows significant gaps in access to opioid treatment programs in rural communities.
- What role can you play in increasing access to opioid treatment programs in underserved areas?
- Read about opioid services not being accessible where they are needed most.
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Opioid overdose deaths have shot up during the pandemic, topping a record-setting 100,000 in the 2021 fiscal year. But only 11 percent of the 2.7 million Americans with opioid-use disorder received medication-assisted treatment in 2020, and opioid treatment programs remain out of reach for many Americans with opioid-use disorder, including those in rural areas, Sheri Doyle and Vanessa Baaklini report for The Pew Charitable Trusts. Not only are OTPs scarcer in rural areas—Wyoming, one of the most rural states, had none at all as of 2020—but rural programs may not do much good if they don't accept Medicaid, offer buprenorphine, or have mental-health care that goes beyond drug treatment.
Pew found significant disparities among the states. OTPs are the only health-care facilities that may offer patients all three types of medication-assisted therapy for opioid addiction, but 60.5% didn't offer injectable naltrexone and 24.2% didn't offer buprenorphine.
Buprenorphine availability may have been hampered because medical providers once had to obtain special training and a waiver to prescribe it, but in April 2021 the Department of Health and Human Services largely did away with the waiver. However, the treatment still may be hard to get because the Drug Enforcement Administration also began cracking down on pharmacies suspected of improperly dispensing it, so many pharmacies subsequently refused to dispense it all.
Read the full article about rural opioid treatment programs by Heather Chapman at The Rural Blog.