Health Experts Hold Forum on Highly Successful Baltimore Overdose Prevention Program

BALTIMORE—The Open Society Institute-Baltimore and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are hosting a forum Tuesday, September 20, on an innovative overdose prevention program, called Staying Alive, that city health officials and experts credit with reducing fatal overdoses.

The Staying Alive program began in 2004 with support from the Open Society Institute-Baltimore and the Baltimore City Health Department as an effort to reduce opiate overdose deaths. Fatal overdoses long have been a major public health problem in Baltimore, but such deaths are easy to prevent and to treat because opiate overdoses often take several hours, offering enough time to provide life-saving measures.

Since Staying Alive began, its staff has encouraged drug-dependent individuals, their families and friends to seek treatment. Staying Alive staffers also have trained drug-dependent individuals to recognize the signs of an overdose and to perform rescue breathing after calling 911. In addition, the staff has trained them to administer Narcan, an opiate antidote that can revive a person near death from a heroin overdose.

Drug-dependent people who complete a training course and score over 80 percent on a final quiz are given Narcan to inject if someone is overdosing. Since the program began, 790 people have been trained. The program has saved the lives of more than 105 people and has referred many to drug-addiction treatment. City health officials say that Baltimore recorded 261 overdose deaths last year, down 19 percent from 321 deaths in 2000. Only a handful of other cities in the United States have similar programs to reduce overdose deaths.

Tuesday’s forum, sponsored by OSI-Baltimore’s Drug Addiction Treatment Program, will feature Staying Alive staff, prescribing physicians, participants and evaluators from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. A man who has been through the training and who has saved the life of an overdosing individual also will share his experience. The participants will describe the Staying Alive program and its progress in saving lives. The forum also will provide an opportunity to discuss the implementation of the program, ways to serve more people and how the program fits within the city’s drug addiction treatment services. “The success of this program in saving lives through simple first aid demonstrates its value and the importance of continuing it,” says Dr. Robert Schwartz, director of OSI-Baltimore’s Drug Addiction Treatment Program.

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