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Recently, the University of Arizona Center for Rural Health received a $2.2 million grant to work with the Arizona Department of Health Services. 

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration awarded the grant to train first responders to administer naloxone, an opioid reversal agent. In the wake of 790 deaths in Arizona alone throughout 2016, Governor Doug Ducey declared a public health emergency. 

In response, Taylor George, a UA alum and ADHS section chief of the Bureau of Emergency Services and Trauma System assisted in obtaining the grant and will lead the project.

AzCRH will help with educational elements, teaching police and other first responders how to identify symptoms and use naloxone. 

“But we also want to go beyond that,” said AzCRH Director Daniel Derksen. "We want to do screening and brief intervention so we’re not just addressing the immediate issue of the overdose.”

In many cases, when overdoses take place in rural areas the nearest hospital or police station is 30-40 miles away. 

“If you overdose with an opioid and stop breathing, it only takes about four minutes to do irreversible brain damage,” Derksen said. 

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KVOA.com | Written By Eric Fink

TUCSON - The opioid epidemic is killing three Arizonans a day. 

Doctors and researchers at the University of Arizona hope a new multi-year $2.2 million dollar grant will go a long way to helping both the patient and the protector.

The university's College of Public Health is now taking the lead across the state to make sure every first responder, no matter where they live knows how to use Narcan, a nasal spray that can reverse the effects of an overdose. Narcan has proven a force in the fight against the crisis.  

"When you're a distance from a health facility, the difference between life and death can be seconds and minutes," Dr. Daniel Derksen with the College of Public Health at the University of Arizona said.  "If someone recognizes someone is in an opioid overdose situation, administering Naloxone, reverses those effects very quickly that it can save lives."

Brian Keeley is with Northwest Fire in Tucson.

All of its firefighters and first responders are trained and carry Narcan on their trucks.

"When you give this medication, it works within 30 seconds," Keeley said. "This is absolutely the lifesaver for any heroin or opioid overdose. It's the one thing that will instantaneously counteract and save a person's life."

Keeley stresses it should only be used as a last resort. 

"It should not be relied upon as it's okay to take or abuse these medications or these drugs because there is something that counteracts it out there," he said. 

KJZZ | Jan. 23, 2018 | By  Will Stone

When a patient came into her practice not long ago with a broken jaw, it wasn’t a difficult diagnosis for Dr. Christina Goldstein-Charbonneau.

“Obviously I could see her jaw was big as anything,” said Charbonneau, a primary care physician in Bullhead City.

Dr. Christina Goldstein-Charbonneau is a primary care physician who practices integrative medicine in Bullhead City.

But she did something that may have seemed overly cautious in years past.

“In today’s climate, the way it is right now, I actually went over there and said ‘I’m sorry I can’t give you anything,’” she said. “‘Let’s hold off, let me go and get your X-rays.’”

The patient had actually gone to the emergency room first where they had refused to give her pain medication. Charbonneau hurried to get the medical records and only once confirmed did she prescribe an opioid.

This hypervigilance has become the norm for doctors in this remote, underserved corner of northwest Arizona — a place hard hit by opioid abuse and overdose deaths.

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Vicki Karr | Tucson News Now | January 31, 2018

A federal grant will allow the state and the University of Arizona to ramp up their efforts to combat the opioid crisis in communities across the state.

Since mid-June, 5,512 people have suffered a suspected overdose from opioids. More than 800 of the cases turned deadly. Click here to see the latest numbers in real time.

The $3 million grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will allow state and university workers to help train first responders in rural communities.

First responders will be trained to identify the symptoms of opioid abuse, and they will also be equipped with the drug Naloxone. Also known as Narcan, it’s used to block the effects of opioids especially during an overdose.

But Dan Derksen with the U of A said the grant will allow them to go beyond administering the drug. They will be trained on things like opioid screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment curriculum.

Derksen said in many cases patients who overdose have overdosed before, so he hopes providing resources will help stop the addiction cycle before it turns deadly.

Derksen said with people in Arizona dying daily, there’s no time to waste.

“We have to be doing something different than we have been doing. There’s been more than two Arizonans dying every single day of opioid overdose. More than half of which are related to prescription overdose,” he said.

The money will also be used to train people in the community. The grant funds will be put into the communities over the next four years.

Arizona 360 Episode 104 on Friday January 26, 2018, 8:30 PM PBS 6

Host: Lorraine Rivera | Producer: Kassandra Lau | Arizona Public Media

In its first major order of business, the Arizona Legislature tackled the opioid epidemic by  unanimously passing the Arizona Opioid Epidemic Act in a special session. Gov. Doug Ducey signed the legislation Friday. He initiated the special session to take up the measure on Monday. 

Daniel Derksen oversees the University of Arizona Center for Rural Health, which just received a $2 million federal grant to reduce opioid deaths.

He told Lorraine Rivera how new legislation begins to address the crisis: “This is a public health approach to a very difficult issue… If there were two to three people dying per day.. [from] Ebola virus … you would get a whole different level of urgency. The urgency should be just as high for this [opioid] epidemic as it would be for an infectious disease. This isn’t just affecting a certain segment of the population. This has penetrated our high schools, our grade schools, wherever you live in the state – whether it’s rural or urban, Phoenix or Tucson – we have to take this to a whole different level if we are going to make an impact.” Daniel Derksen, M.D.

WASHINGTON POST 
By Jeff Stein, January 12, 2018 

Indiana hopes to make Medicaid enrollees pay a fee if they smoke cigarettes. Arizona wants to put a five-year limit on how long its poor residents can be enrolled in the program.

These proposals are part of a host of changes that mostly conservative states have unsuccessfully sought for years to overhaul Medicaid, a federal insurance program for the poor and disabled.

Now, the Trump administration is giving at least some of these initiatives the green light. On Thursday, health officials issued new guidance to state Medicaid directors, saying the administration would allow states to impose work requirements on certain Medicaid recipients — a first in the program’s 53-year history.

Perhaps the most dramatic changes being sought are in Arizona, Utah and Kansas, which are seeking to create unprecedented “lifetime caps” on Medicaid. Currently, poor Americans in every state can remain on Medicaid as long as they qualify. All three states have sought to create new policies with unprecedented limitations on the number of years participants could stay on Medicaid — up to five years in Arizona and Utah, and up to three years in Kansas.
It’s unclear if the Trump administration will permit lifetime caps. The Obama administration rejected similar requests. Trump officials have given no indication they plan to approve them.
Critics slammed the proposals.

“We’d see a dramatic increase in the number of uninsured,” said Daniel Derksen, professor of public health at the University of Arizona, about how that provision would impact his state. “You’d also see the rate of closure for rural and critical-access hospitals go up — those are the vulnerable parts of the health community that could only absorb a certain amount” [of uncompensated and charity care].

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