Increasing Access to Therapeutic, Reentry, and Peer-Assisted Recovery Support Services and Reducing Overdoses in Wilkes County

Wilkes County proposes to implement a program entitled “Increasing Access to Therapeutic, Reentry, and Peer-Assisted Recovery Support Services and Reduction of Overdoses in Wilkes County.” The program seeks to reduce the impact of illicit opioids, stimulants, and other substances on individuals and communities, reduce the number of overdose deaths, increase multi-agency collaborations for fighting substance use disorder, and increase the capacity of the collaborative partners to deploy evidence-based deflection practices, including through integration of peer support services. 

Project activities include: 1) Providing two Peer Support Specialists to support the work of the county’s Community Paramedics in responding to substance use-related emergencies and overdose cases. This will help, to promote treatment uptake, support long-term recovery, achieve harm reduction and secondary prevention, and implement deflection; 2) Facilitating behavioral health training for Wilkes County’s Community Paramedics and the Peer Support Specialists to build their collaborative capacity to address co-existing mental health components of substance use-related emergencies and overdose cases; 3) Enhancing the implementation of the Wilkes County Jail-based Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) program and adding two Peer Support Specialists in collaboration with the Lazarus Project; and 4) Establishing an Overdose Fatality Review Team to gather and analyze data on individual overdose deaths, to identify patterns and risk factors, and develop actionable harm reduction recommendations for reducing overdose deaths. 
Wilkes County proposes research and evaluation of these four initiatives, which will result in publishable findings and sharable learnings to help inform and improve evidence-based responses to substance use disorder, opioid use disorder, co-existing behavioral health issues, and overdoses, and strengthen implementation of MAT with embedded peer support.