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Date: 7/12/2021
WESTERN MASS. – Due to a grant from Baystate Noble Hospital, three area organizations are able to help continue and further their work to prevent and treat opioid-related substance abuse-use disorders.
The grant awarded money to Coalition for Outreach Recovery and Education (CORE) of Greater Westfield, Tapestry Health and the West Springfield Health Department. West Springfield’s Director of Public Health Jeanne Galloway said the $19,720 grant received by the department will help provide resources to their Drug Abuse Response Team (DART).
Galloway said the team will benefit from the grant as it will provide additional resources to help them continue the treatment and work they do to combat the opioid crisis in the community. One of the ways in which the team will benefit from the grant is by allowing for the purchase of medication disposal pouches that can be distributed during their follow up visits and among other members of the community.
“One of the things they do is a post-overdose visit. A team of individuals, including some from Baystate Health Services, go out to visit and make sure they have connections to rehab should they decide to go. They go to the residence of the individual who had the recent overdose, talk to them, their family, friends, whoever is there,” she said. “The grant is providing to use, at that time, medication disposal pouches. If you have drugs and/or medicine you want to get rid of or don’t want around the house, you put them in the pouch and they’re automatically rendered useless and then they’re thrown away.”
These pouches, she said, would be distributed in “a couple different sizes” with educational materials provided by Hampshire Hope, which would be available in several different languages.
In addition to the pouches being distributed through post-overdose visits, Galloway said they were also working with the city’s council on aging department to distribute the pouches to the elderly as well. “Family member’s homes are the source of medication that some people use to get started or enable,” she said. Galloway said the pouches would be distributed to older residents via the Meals On Wheels program.
She said the grant would also fund additional training for the team. “The other facet of our grant is for training for our DART officers so they can continue developing their knowledge, skills and abilities to help folks,” she said.
CORE of Greater Westfield is another organization that received a grant through Baystate Noble. CORE Coordinator Kathi Cotugno said the program, which is run under the city’s Health Department, “provides services and education for substance abuse.” She said the program was created “five years ago when we had a weekend of multiple overdoses.”
CORE, she explained, helps members of the West Springfield DART team, which is run through the Police Department. “What happens is when someone in town overdoses, we then go on an outreach call to that person to provide them services, support if they want to get into a program we can help them into that program, offer Narcan,” she said. “Then in that program, Tapestry Health is the outreach that goes out on that call for us here in Westfield, we also offer home reduction services for them.”
In addition to providing services for those recovering from an overdose, she said they also provide educational material and resources for community members. “The recovery community in Westfield has really come together. We just offer them services and support. Our education team is involved in school education and education in public schools, trying to provide programming to our youth on substance abuse,” she said.
The purpose of the DART program, she explained, is “about support and services, it’s not a policing department.” As the DART program has expanded across Western Massachusetts and entered Hampden County, she said a database program has been created to collect data. However, she said this information doesn’t always make its way back to town officials, who can help with follow up and provide support locally. She explained that with the $20,000 grant they received from Baystate Health Services, they were planning to create their own database that would connect with area hospitals.
“The grant is going to pay for Westfield to create their own database and reach out to other surrounding Noble hospitals in the area,” she said. Cotugno said through a separate grant they were able to secure funding for a recovery coach who will “go out and see that person.” She said, “It could be weekly, it could be monthly.
“Really it’s about if they make that connection and if that person is struggling they can call the recovery coach, it’s a social step put in place,” she said. “We’re always finding them on the back end of an addiction or arrest. We’re hoping to build enough services that those people can move outside of the police parameter of services. That’s our long-term goal.”
Tapestry Health, based in Springfield with locations in several Western Massachusetts communities, also received a portion of the grant, totaling $20,848. Tapestry’s Assistant Director for Rural Harm Reductions Operations Amy Davis said the organization will use the grant to produce and promote educational videos on a variety of topics. “We got funds to create sort of visual education tools, videos essentially,” she said. She said the videos would include a variety of topics such as Narcan training, fentanyl exposure facts and procedures when they respond with Narcan.
Davis said they wanted to “ease people in” and the videos would contain “testimonials from doctors, nurses [and] participants.” She said, “Our goal is to educate through storytelling.”
She said additionally, the organization would be producing a “longer, full length feature film” that would share the “inside story” of “people struggling with drugs, what it’s like to go through detox [and] what it’s like at a needle exchange.”
She said the film was part of their mission to try to educate people about “the gaps in healthcare we see.”
“Our goal is to try to create a more empathetic community that’s better equipped [to help those who’ve] had traumatic events,” she said.
Davis said the shorter films would be released on their website (tapestryhealth.org) and their Facebook page (Tapestry WMass). She said people could expect the videos to be shared “around the fall time.” Additionally, she said the premiere of the feature film would take place as a hybrid event in Northampton at a date yet to be announced. She said it would be streamed online so that “anyone can tune into that” and they “want to get it out to the public.”