An Inside Look Into the Rural Communities Opioid Response Program
New provisional data released by the Federal Government estimate that nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdoses from January to December 2021. The devastating toll of the overdose crisis within the United States has impacted all Americans, particularly in rural America. Rural communities have experienced a consistent rise in drug overdose deaths, with a nearly a five-fold increase from 1999 to 2019.
JBS has extensive experience working with rural communities to mitigate this rise in overdose deaths. For the past 4 years, we have supported the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Rural Communities Opioid Response Program (RCORP) to deliver technical assistance (TA) to rural communities. The purpose of the RCORP initiative is to support treatment for, and prevention of, substance use disorder (SUD), including opioid use disorder (OUD), in high-risk rural counties, including the 220 counties identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as being at risk for HIV and hepatitis C infections due to injection drug use. RCORP supports the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Overdose Prevention Strategy, part of its 2022 investment of $104 million to expand SUD treatment and prevention services in rural communities to combat the overdose epidemic.
In 2018, HRSA’s Federal Office of Rural Health Policy awarded grants to teams of health care and behavioral health professionals, public health researchers, faith-based organizations, Indigenous leaders, and community organizations to fight the opioid epidemic, using evidence-based, community-driven solutions. Since 2018, JBS’s RCORP-TA team has responded to more than 8,000 TA requests and served more than 1,800 rural counties in 47 states. RCORP-TA has served more than 700 grantees, up from 95 in 2018 when the program began.
JBS is building from community strengths to plan and implement an informed, accessible, coordinated SUD/OUD response in rural America. Our goal to find solutions communities can embrace, implement, and sustain effectively is a highly individualized process, and we tailor evidence-based interventions and best practices to fit a community’s needs.
In rapidly shifting environments, grantees need reliable, knowledgeable experts who are highly responsive to their needs. JBS maintains a deep bench of subject matter experts from diverse backgrounds, possessing impressive work experience and acting as living repositories of information, all of which they use to assist grantees in addressing behavioral health needs in their communities.
The National Organization of State Offices of Rural Health sets aside the third Thursday of every November to celebrate National Rural Health Day (NRHD), which was celebrated on November 17, 2022, this year. NRHD is an opportunity to “Celebrate the Power of Rural” by honoring the spirit that prevails in rural America. This day highlights efforts of rural health care providers, organizations and cooperatives, State Offices of Rural Health, and stakeholders from various industry sectors dedicated to addressing the unique healthcare challenges that rural citizens face today and into the future.