Gloucester Times: Federal Grants to Help Expand Drug Treatment: Community health centers say federal money will expand care for addicts

April 8, 2016

By: Ethan Forman, Staff Writer

SALEM — Congressman Seth Moulton Thursday announced two federal grants to two local community health centers to provide expanded addiction treatment on the North Shore and Cape Ann.

“You are on the front lines battling the opioid addiction crisis, which is hitting our community hard, but hitting communities across the country,” said Moulton, speaking to a packed small conference room on the first floor of Salem Family Health Center on Congress Street.

North Shore Community Health, Inc. received $352,083 and Lynn Community Health Center — a separate entity — got $325,000 to expand amid an “unprecedented demand” for addiction treatment services. 

NSCHI has locations in Salem, Gloucester and Peabody while the Lynn-based organization has several locations in that city.

Gloucester has been especially hard hit, said Margaret Brennan, CEO of NSCHI, and most of her organization’s resources from the grant will be focused there.

“We serve about 250 patients right now,” Brennan said, “100 of them are in Gloucester. So we are going to work very closely with the chief (Leonard Campanello), and the Angel project up there to get those folks into treatment, whether it’s a bed or office-based opioid therapy at the Gloucester (Family) Health Center.”

Brennan explained that “office-based opioid therapy” is substance abuse treatment in a primary care office.

“It’s going to allow us to get more, to get more people into treatment, basically,” she said, adding that by hiring another prescriber and another nurse case manager, NSCHI could double its capacity in Gloucester. The organization currently manages 45 patients in Salem, 100 in Gloucester and nearly 100 in Peabody.

The grants are funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

‘This is on everyone’s front burner’

Moulton, a member of the Bipartisan Taskforce to Combat the Heroin Epidemic, also outlined a number of changes to federal rules that could increase access to treatment and protect caregivers from liability. Among them is a bill to protect firefighters, police officers or ambulance EMTs from civil liability when administering an overdose-reversing drug like Narcan to save someone’s life. Moulton said he has co-sponsored eight such bills.

Caregivers, administrators from the two community health organizations, Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll and state Rep. Paul Tucker were among those in attendance on Tuesday. Tucker, Salem’s former police chief, served 34 years in law enforcement, a majority of which he spent in the narcotics and detectives divisions.

“We thought we were on the front lines, we thought we were the ones who were going to make a difference,” said Tucker. “But, if you look back now, we certainly didn’t make a difference. We did in maybe a small way, but we missed the bigger picture, and I think that as we missed the bigger picture, I think it had a lot to do with who is suffering from this.”

He said addiction hits everyone.

“Having a federal partner, like our congressman, working with the mayor, this is on everyone’s front burner, this is on the radar of everyone,” he said, praising the passage of a recent state law to curb opioid abuse, while calling for the need for a more comprehensive approach to fight the epidemic.

Moulton singled out the work of Campanello, who created the Angel program with the Gloucester police, an initiative that pairs an addict who asks police for help with a volunteer “angel” to guide them through treatment. Those who seek help through the program are not arrested, charged or jailed.

“Someone who, by the way,” Moulton said of Campanello, “has spent eight years of his life battling this problem as a narcotics officer on the street, and who has now said, ‘Look, all the work that I did, was well-intentioned, we worked very hard, but it just hasn’t made a big difference.’ And, so, he’s taking a different approach.”

Full article here.