City readies opioid team

Effort aims to get overdose survivors into treatment

The days after a near-fatal overdose can bring embarrassment, loneliness and a deeper dive into addiction — or they can mark a turning point. The chance for recovery improves if someone calls or drops by with an offer of help.

That’s the theory behind an emerging Post Overdose Response Team, or PORT, involving the city of Pittsburgh, a South Hills coalition and the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Emergency Medicine of Western Pennsylvania.

If all goes according to plan, a state-funded three-person team will start work in and around Carrick in the coming months, reaching out directly to overdose survivors in an effort to help them to get treatment, according to Laura Drogowski, who works on the opioid problem as the city’s critical communities manager, a position created by Mayor Bill Peduto.

An overdose may motivate someone to seek help, but can also leave them too isolated and weak to get through the difficult process of finding the right treatment, said Melissa Ruggiero, an attorney, Carrick resident and co-chair of the South Pittsburgh Opioid Action Coalition, one of the PORT partners.

“How do we help these folks who have this illness and are

suffering, and are ready to get help?” she asked. The PORT answer: “Just showing people that you care, showing up and offering your hand, not defining the person as an addict but as someone who is suffering from an illness and needs help ... could make a big difference in someone’s life.”

The PORT will include a person trained in paramedicine and social work, a police officer and a peer recovery specialist who has experienced addiction.

When it launches, medics, firefighters and police responding to overdoses will be encouraged to ask the person for permission to make a referral to the new team.

If the person agrees, the team will call them within a few days, and knock on their door if necessary.

In addition to presenting treatment options, the team will try to help with the many issues that can contribute to drug use — mental health problems, social isolation, poor housing, lack of transportation and more, said Dan Swayze, vice president and chief operating officer of the Center for Emergency Medicine.

The PORT is modeled in part on a Quick Response Team created in Colerain, Ohio, to deal with that Cincinnati suburb’s public health and safety problems, especially its overdoses.

“When you overdose in our community, we’re going to show up at your house,” said Daniel Meloy, Colerain’s public safety director. “We’re going to knock on the door and tell you that we’re here for you, we’re here for your family, and we’re going to try damn hard to save your life.”

In cases in which the team has had face-to-face contact with someone three to five days after their overdose, they’ve gotten that person into treatment 82 percent of the time, Mr. Meloy said. That has ripple effects, he said.

“They’re not stealing from our stores. They’re not breaking into cars. They’re not burglarizing copper.”

And for a while, they weren’t dying as often — though that changed in late 2016 when super-potent carfentanil showed up, driving fatalities skyward.

Pitt’s Center for Emergency Medicine recently won a $150,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, which will fund the team for a year. The center will work with the Congress of Neighboring Communities, or CONNECT, a Pittbased project that helps the city and 40 nearby suburbs to solve shared problems.

CONNECT already employs four community medics, and plans to add a fifth to help staff the PORT.

The team plans to recruit a peer recovery specialist from one of the region’s drug rehabilitation Centers of Excellence. The city will provide a police officer.

Once it is running, the PORT should save lives and get people into recovery, while also giving police, firefighters and paramedics a much-needed glimpse of hope as they race to overdoses every day, said Mr. Swayze, who, in addition to his Pitt role, directs CONNECT’s community paramedics program.

“The medics and police officers are getting burnt out by this,” he said. “We can’t just continue to take [overdose victims] to emergency departments that aren’t really equipped to deal with the problem.”

In recent months, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette zoomed in on Carrick’s struggles in special reports Riding OD Road and Life and Death on Santron Avenue.

ZIP Code 15210, which includes most of Carrick and the “Hilltop” neighborhoods to its north, saw 179 fatal overdoses since 2008, according to the Pennsylvania Opioid Overdose Reduction Technical Assistance Center of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Pharmacy. That’s the most drug deaths of any ZIP Code in the region.

“This team will be dedicated specifically to this geographic region,” said Megan Neuf, project coordinator for the Technical Assistance Center. The partner groups will use data to figure out whether to expand the PORT, and how.

Zan Dodson, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health, has been studying the geography of opioid-related crimes and emergencies and thinks the team can make a difference.

“The PORT model is really excellent,” he said, “because it says: We see you as a person, we see you as struggling with something, and we’re here to help you however we can.”