Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare and the Apalachee Center have teamed up to improve access to out-patient services for people struggling with opioid addiction.
"We already had a well-established behavioral emergency services team that was already seeing patients that were coming in with opioid withdrawal," explains Heather Lancicome, chief liaison for TMH and the Apalachee Center, "but there were some deficits in our ability to be able to refer the immediately, that is really the best practice."
The two organizations work to treat people dealing with opioid addiction from the point of identification all the way through to recovery.
Apalachee Center president and CEO Jay Reeves says, "It's crucial in that moment to do two things: One is to get them on the right kind of medication that they need to help alleviate the impact of the opioid use and help bring them out of the acute phase of addiction, but there's another part that has to do with them having a warm hand-off into out-patient services."
To expedite that process, and not lose patients at a critical juncture, a new partnership places Apalachee Center peer support specialists in TMH's emergency department to smooth the transition between the in-patient treatment for the symptoms and the out-patient care and counseling for the cause.
"The peer specialists in this program will make contact with the patient after they leave the emergency department to make sure that they have followed up with out patient treatment to make sure that if there's any barriers to getting that care that those things are addressed," Lancicome says.
Peer support specialists like Beth Dees have lived through similar circumstances and offer hope. "It does get easier as you learn about your illness, and you learn ways to cope, so I believe that recovery is possible for everyone," she says. She, and other support specialists, now serve as a bridge over an important gap on the road to opioid abuse recovery.
Since the program began this month, they've gotten patients from in patient to out patient care in under 24 hours.
Services made available through the new partnership are available for people both with and without insurance.
