Ontario to track opioid overdoses
Hospitals to compile weekly data, reports to help battle drug crisis
Ontario hospitals are going to start tracking opioid overdoses on a weekly basis.
Starting April 1, data will be compiled across all hospitals weekly and reports of province-wide trends and findings will be sent to “stakeholders” (municipalities, public health units, hospitals) every month, the office of the Minister of Health & Long-Term Care reports.
The number of opioid-related deaths rose steadily between 2010 and 2015, according to preliminary data from the office of the chief coroner for Ontario.
In total, 710 people in the province are believed to have died opioid-related deaths in 2015, an increase from 514 in 2010.
Eighty-six of the 421 opioid-related deaths in 2010 were caused by fentanyl, while five of the 93 opioid-and-alcoholrelated deaths were because of fentanyl. This almost doubled in 2015 to 167 of the 551 opioid-related deaths and 37 of the 159 opioid-and-alcohol-related deaths.
Ontario Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins and provincial overdose co-ordinator Dr. David Williams sent out a letter to hospitals with emergency departments on Feb. 13 about the new tracking system.
Hoskins said in a statement that “major steps” have already been taken to battle the opioid crisis, but the tracking system is “another step forward.”
Every hospital and public-health unit will be able to access the data, “giving experts a more comprehensive understanding of what’s happening on the ground,” he said.
The information “may also be used to inform harm-reduction initiatives,” Hoskins said.
Members of the harm-reduction community were pleased the province will be tracking opioid-related overdoses.
“It’s absolutely necessary,” said Walter Cavalieri, the founding director of the Canadian Harm Reduction Network. “But it’s about 10 years overdue.”
Cavalieri, who said overdoses in Ontario have reached “a critical situation,” added that those who work in the field “have always been asking for more data and more specific data so we could do better planning.”
Now, he’s hoping the new data will allow for “some strategic planning, maybe focused on neighbourhoods or focused on drug types, because, right now, we’re working on hearsay on all of this.”
“In Ontario, we don’t know what our situation really is here, because the coroner’s data, which is very good, is about a year-and-a-half or two years behind,” Cavalieri said.
Mary Kay MacVicar, program coordinator for harm reduction at the non-profit Street Health, agreed that more data was important “to provide evidence of the epidemic.
“It seems to be essential in capturing the attention of those in positions of power, whether that’s politicians or different health officials,” she said.
“Then we can actually start to develop effective responses.”
MacVicar and Cavalieri agree there needs to be a plan beyond the new data collection. Cavalieri emphasized the importance of the data being “relatively complex” and encompassing more than just numbers, but also where people are overdosing and what they’re overdosing on.
“I hope they will also look at what data they can grab on overdoses that are not fatal, because there’s a huge number of them and they can tell us a lot, too,” he said.
Hoskins agreed that while the tracking system is “a big step forward” that will help save lives, “more can be done.”