Grant money for Wayne opioid treatment

By OWEN WALSH
Posted 8/28/19

WAYNE COUNTY, PA — The Health Resources and Services Administration has awarded nearly $1 million to the Wright Center for Community Health in Scranton to develop an opioid response program for …

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Grant money for Wayne opioid treatment

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WAYNE COUNTY, PA — The Health Resources and Services Administration has awarded nearly $1 million to the Wright Center for Community Health in Scranton to develop an opioid response program for Wayne and Lackawanna counties.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pennsylvania has one of the highest rates of opioid-related overdose deaths in the country. Certain barriers to treatment are more prevalent in rural communities such as Wayne County than in more urban areas.

“Some of the barriers are just very basic things like availability of certain services,” said Jefferey Zerechak, director of the Wayne County Drug & Alcohol Commission (D&A), which is a key partner in this initiative. Zerechak said understaffing, lack of transportation and geography limit local residents’ access to medical treatment for their addictions.

The commission is still working out the details of its partnership with the Wright Center, but Zerechak said the two will be working toward expanding the availability of medical-assisted treatment (MAT) services. MAT is an approach to treating opioid-use disorders through a combination of medications, counseling and behavioral therapy. With this, Zerechak hopes to expand the availability of specialized medical care, case management and recovery specialist staffs in the area.

According to a press release, the three-year grant will translate into an additional $100,000 in Wayne County for opioid treatment and recovery services. In recent years, opioids have become markedly prevalent in Wayne County.

“We saw, over the past three or four years, more people coming here reporting heroin and opioids as their primary presenting problem [more frequently] than alcohol,” said Zerechak. “When you see something like that, that’s disturbing.”
He qualified that statistic, however, saying that there are likely more people with addictions to alcohol than to opioids, but that these people are not coming in for help, so they do not get reported. Zerechak also noted that D&A has recorded an uptick in meth and cocaine use in the county.

In addition to expanding MAT services, the groups involved plan to use the grant money to extend opioid pregnancy recovery services and naloxone administration training. Naloxone, or Narcan, is a medication that can be used to reverse the effects of an opioid-related overdose.

opioids, Wayne County, grant

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