Community Action Team Pillars & Interventions

Ensuring optimal supplies, training and community-level infrastructure to ensure sustained Naloxone access, including:

• Coverage

• Supplies

• Trainers

• On-going capacity

Community-level strategies to ensure on-going psycho-social support, access to housing, income stabilization, transportation, food:

• Services for engagement/capacity building to strengthen support networks such as family/ friends

• Availability of support groups/healing circles, counselling

• Access to affordable and/or supported housing

• Support programs incorporate capacity to address housing, income, food insecurity

Supporting a diversity of community-level, low barrier services tailored to population/ community needs, such as:

• Overdose Prevention Sites

• Supervised Consumption Sites

• Housing-based initiatives

• Strategies to reach individuals using alone

• Mobile Services

• Drug Checking

• Safe drug supply (e.g. hydromorphone in supervised settings)

Providing individual skills and capacity building initiatives within individuals and communities with lived experience:

• Diversity of paid peer program opportunities

• Peer-led initiatives

• Peer training opportunities

• Programs involve people with lived experience in strategic program planning and decision makings

Robust surveillance, analytics and referral system to identify individuals at risk within communities and capacity for follow-up connection to care:

• Proactive screening for problematic opioid use

• Clinical follow-up

• Fast-track pathways to treatment and care

• System for monitoring/evaluating patient outcomes

In collaboration with Indigenous communities and organizations, ensuring services are rooted in an understanding of the social and historical context of health and healthcare inequities:

• Cultural safety teachings and support are available to all service providers

• Facility/space and program design is trauma informed and culturally safe

• Continuum of services and support incorporates Aboriginal approaches to healing and wellness • Elders are involved in service delivery and planning

Ensuring low-barrier access to full spectrum of evidence-based medications and comprehensive treatment & recovery services, including access to:

• Methadone, suboxone, oral morphine, injectable hydromorphone

• Continuum of treatment and recovery programs for opioid dependence that combine pharmacological and psychosocial approaches.

• Multi-disciplinary approach to pain management.

Policy/legal analysis and action plans to address barriers to services based on stigma and discrimination:

• Access to legal team to address discriminatory laws and policies that impact harm reduction

• Public education resources, campaigns re. stigma

• Community-level actions to address barriers in access to services for people who use drugs.