Wentworth County's overdose death toll dropped again this year, continuing a three-year decline that health officials say reflects real gains in treatment access, even as they caution the crisis is far from over.
Preliminary figures released by the Wentworth County Department of Health show 61 confirmed overdose deaths countywide over the past year, down from 79 the year before and a peak of 118 three years ago. Dr. Kwame Asare, the department’s director, called the trend “the most encouraging sustained movement we’ve seen since the crisis peaked,” while cautioning that the county’s per-capita overdose rate remains well above the national average.
“Sixty-one is still sixty-one families who lost someone,” Asare said. “I want to be careful about how we talk about this data, because a declining number is not the same thing as a solved problem.” He attributed the decline to a combination of expanded naloxone distribution, a county-funded outreach van program operating in Lowertown and Cedar Hollow, and increased treatment-bed capacity at facilities including Wayfinder Recovery Services’ Lowertown sober-living program.
Treatment capacity has nearly doubled
Donna Wysocki, executive director of Wayfinder Recovery Services, said her organization’s outpatient program has grown from serving about 90 clients at a time three years ago to nearly 170 today, aided by a state grant and additional funding the county board approved after the crisis’s peak year. Wayfinder also opened 14 new sober-living beds at its Lowertown facility over the past 18 months, bringing its total capacity to 46 beds.
“We used to have people calling us in crisis and having to wait ten days for a bed,” Wysocki said. “Now, most weeks, we can get someone into a program within 48 hours. That gap between when somebody is ready to get help and when a bed is actually available is where we used to lose people, and it’s gotten meaningfully smaller.”
Nobody survives an overdose crisis because of one program. It’s the outreach van finding somebody under a bridge on a Tuesday, the sober-living bed that’s actually open when they’re ready, and the hospital that treats them like a patient instead of a problem, all working at the same time.
Donna Wysocki, Executive Director, Wayfinder Recovery Services
Hospital system expands behavioral health
Dr. Angela Whitcombe, chief executive of Bellwater General Health System, said the hospital system has expanded its behavioral-health unit and added addiction-medicine specialists to its emergency department staff over the past two years, a change she said has reduced the share of overdose patients discharged without a treatment referral from roughly 40 percent to under 15 percent.
“We used to stabilize somebody and send them out the door with a pamphlet,” Whitcombe said. “Now our emergency department has a warm handoff process where a recovery specialist meets the patient before they’re discharged, ideally with an actual appointment already scheduled instead of a phone number to call.” Whitcombe said the hospital’s expansion was funded partly through the system’s own budget and partly through county and state behavioral-health grants.
The Riverside Free Clinic, which serves uninsured residents concentrated in Lowertown and Cedar Hollow, has also expanded its role, now offering on-site medication-assisted treatment three days a week, up from one day a week three years ago. Clinic staff said demand for those appointments has grown steadily enough that they are exploring adding a fourth day next year.
A story from the numbers
Curtis Boone, a 41-year-old Cedar Hollow resident who has been in recovery for just over two years, said the county’s outreach van program reached him at a point when he was not yet ready to seek treatment on his own. “They didn’t push,” Boone said. “They just kept showing up in the same spot every week with naloxone and clean supplies and no judgment, until eventually I was the one who asked them for help instead of the other way around.”
Boone said he went through Wayfinder’s outpatient program and now works part-time at a Cedar Hollow hardware store, and volunteers occasionally with the same outreach van that first approached him. “I don’t think people always understand how long that road is,” he said. “It wasn’t one program. It was that same van showing up for months before anything changed.”
Asare said funding for the outreach van program was nearly caught up in the same budget dispute that shadowed last year’s contested vote over a riverfront public-art grant, when Council Member Gary Petrowski argued the city should prioritize a second outreach van over additional arts spending. The van funding ultimately came through a separate state grant rather than the contested city arts fund, allowing the council to approve both initiatives without one displacing the other.
“We got lucky that the money ended up coming from two different pots,” Asare said. “But I don’t think we should count on that alignment happening every year. The need for outreach funding isn’t going away just because this year’s numbers went down.”
Asare said the department plans to release a full annual report, including neighborhood-level breakdowns, within the next two months, and will use the data to make the case for renewing the outreach van program’s funding when it comes up for review before the county board next year.
Whitcombe said Bellwater General is also tracking a shift in who is showing up in its emergency department for overdose-related care, with a growing share of patients in their 50s and 60s rather than the younger demographic the hospital saw a decade ago. “The population struggling with this has aged along with the crisis itself,” she said. “Our behavioral-health staffing has had to adjust for patients who often have decades of chronic health issues layered on top of active addiction, which is a different kind of case than what we used to see.”
Wysocki said Wayfinder is also seeing more referrals arrive through employers rather than emergency rooms or the courts, a shift she attributed partly to the city’s tightening labor market. “We’re getting calls now from managers at Foundry Row employers asking how to point an employee toward treatment instead of just quietly firing them,” she said. “That’s not something I would have predicted five years ago, but a tight labor market can do things that awareness campaigns never managed.”