After participating in a special event at the White House this week, Indiana University researcher Cris Henderson is confident that IU’s leadership in helping to prevent opioid overdoses is moving Indiana and the nation in the right direction.
Henderson is a research associate for Prevention Insights and a doctoral student at the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington in the Department of Applied Health Science. They are also project director of the Citizen Opioid Responders (COR) Program, an IU online naloxone training program that seeks to reduce deaths from opioid overdoses by recruiting, training and linking citizen responders to these events so they can administer medications used to reverse opioid overdoses, such as naloxone, also known as Narcan. This year, Henderson and their research team received the Affinity Giving Award from the IU Foundation to implement the COR program across multiple IU campuses and Indiana counties.
At the White House Challenge to Save Lives from Overdose event, Henderson joined leaders from across business, education, entertainment, government, hospitality and other industries who were recognized for their commitment to increase training on—and access to—life-saving opioid overdose reversal medications.
“Going to the White House and receiving the affinity award really illustrated the importance of everyone working together to solve this problem,” Henderson said. “It reinforced for me that we are on the right track, but we need to keep continuing in our effort to solve this problem.
“We need to continue increasing access to overdose education programs like the Citizen Opioid Responders program and continue to identify ways to facilitate low-barrier access to Narcan, including free or reduced cost options, so that more people in our communities get trained and carry this life-saving medication. These efforts can help normalize the use of Narcan, help destigmatize the subject of substance use disorder and more importantly, help save lives.”
Event participants shared successes and challenges related to combating opioid overdose, including expanding access to and increasing training on how to administer naloxone, helping to destigmatize treatment for opioid use disorder, and recognizing opioid use disorder as a disease. They also discussed the importance of bringing together organizations at the local, state and national levels to ensure communities have the proper level of education, online and in-person training programs, data insights and other resources to effectively respond to overdose situations.
The opioid epidemic continues to devastate communities throughout the U.S., especially in Indiana. In 2023, more than 1,500 Hoosiers died from an opioid overdose according to the Indiana Drug Overdose Dashboard.
Henderson’s visit to the White House was the latest in a recent series of events that have brought national attention to IU’s leadership in addressing the opioid crisis. In fall 2023, Henderson and their colleague Jon Agley, an associate professor at the School of Public Health-Bloomington and director of research at Prevention Insights, received a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to test a novel approach to increasing overdose education and readiness to use naloxone nationally. Other IU researchers have also received major grants from the National Institutes of Health in recent months to transform adolescent opioid use disorder care in Indiana, analyze adverse outcomes associated with long-term opioid therapy dose tapering and discontinuation, and provide more timely reporting of data to inform local policies, procedures and interventions to prevent overdoses.
As part of their work with IU’s COR program, Henderson has developed a naloxone training program to effectively prepare laypeople to respond to opioid overdoses and administer naloxone (Narcan). The online, 30-minute course targets rural communities, including those with geographic footprints that can increase emergency response times. This program is currently being used by at least one county health department in Indiana to increase community readiness, and with help from the IU Foundation’s affinity grant will soon expand to at least 5 IU campuses and 3 additional counties.
“Everything presented today really reinforced for me that this is the work we are already doing in Indiana,” Henderson said. “Across all the COR projects I oversee, we intentionally seek to collaborate and partner with different sectors and community partners in those communities, like law enforcement and other first responder groups, local health departments, state government, health systems, treatment and mental health providers, pharmaceutical companies and even chambers of commerce, as well as other industries. This is all in the effort to increase awareness and increase the number of people trained and carrying Narcan in our communities who feel ready, willing and able to administer the medication.”
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