Rates of drug overdose deaths are high and growing. Innovative strategies, such as partnerships between public health and public safety (PH/PS) agencies, are needed to curb these trends. Support for PH/PS partnerships as an overdose prevention strategy is growing; however, little information exists on the makeup of activities within this strategy. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) cooperative agreement supports innovative and comprehensive overdose surveillance and prevention activities across the United States. Within OD2A, funded states, counties/cities, and territories may implement PH/PS partnerships to reduce overdose deaths. An inventory of PH/PS activities described in OD2A recipients' year 2 annual progress reports was conducted. These activities were abstracted for PH/PS partners' roles, intended audience, deliverables, objectives, stage of overdose risk addressed, and type of strategy implemented. The inventory revealed that 49 of the 66 funded jurisdictions planned 109 PH/PS activities. Most aimed to bridge knowledge, data, and service gaps and intervened at higher levels of overdose risk. This analysis highlights opportunities to adapt and expand cross-sector overdose prevention efforts across the overdose risk continuum.
The Martinsburg Initiative (TMI) is a community-based model developed in Martinsburg, West Virginia, that implements a comprehensive approach to adverse childhood experiences and substance use prevention and mitigation by leveraging partnerships in public health and health care, public safety, and education. TMI receives coordinated federal funding and technical assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Agency, and the National Association of County and City Health Officials to integrate evidence-based and promising strategies. It advances such strategies by translating them for implementation within the community, evaluating the reach and potential impact of the model, and by engaging key stakeholders. Preliminary results describing program reach and short-term outcomes collected for a subset of the interventions during implementation are presented. The model uses touchpoints across multiple community sectors in the city of Martinsburg to break the cycle of trauma and substance use across the life span.
Background: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Prevention for States (PfS) program funded 29 state health departments to prevent opioid overdose by implementing evidence-based prevention strategies. The objectives of this analysis were to describe the scope of activities implemented across the four PfS strategies and identify implementation challenges. Methods: PfS recipients submitted annual progress reports (APRs) to state support staff at CDC from 2015 to 2017. APR data were used to calculate the number of required and optional activities implemented under each PfS strategy. APR data were qualitatively analyzed using a systematic content analysis approach to identify key implementation challenges. Results: From 2015 to 2017, PfS recipients implemented 177 activities across four strategies from 2015 to 2017. Cross-cutting implementation challenges were (1) multi-sector collaboration, (2) lack of knowledge and misperceptions about opioid used disorder (OUD) among some partners and local communities and; (3) management and access to opioid data among PfS recipients. Conclusions: PfS recipients implemented an array of prevention interventions to address the opioid overdose crisis and encountered several crosscutting implementation challenges. Challenges and state driven solutions over the course of implementing PfS led to several lessons learned and actions that CDC enacted to continue to support and expand overdose prevention.
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