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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Population

People Who Use Drugs (PWUD) and Substance Use

Language

To ensure the rapid dissemination of this critical information, information is published in the language in which it was submitted. Please contact us for French or English translations.