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Our guest speaker last Friday was Heather Thomas, Public & Governmental Affairs Manager for Snohomish Health District.
Heather's background includes being a Board member of the Washington State Public Health Association and the Puget Sound Public Health Roundtable. Heather has been actively involved in bringing together agencies and partners to further the fight against the opioid epidemic. Her efforts also include organizing the regional heroin forums around the county last fall. Heather's talk today is to share information about the recent 7 day point-in-point data collection as well as other efforts the Health District is leading on these issues.
Recently, Heather received a call from an ABC News producer wanting to learn what Snohomish County was doing about the opioid epidemic One of the questions the producer posed was "what type of real-time data did Heather and the Snohomish Health District have on the opioid and heroin epidemic. As a result, funds were given to Providence Everett to track overdosing and whether it was opioids or other drugs or issues. One nurse is tracking overdoes. In a very short time, there were 256 overdoes. How many overdoes were accidental? She mentioned that heroin is the drug of choice for the younger generation and opioids are for the older generation.
During a seven day period, a total of 37 overdoes were reported that appeared to be related to opioids. Unfortunately, three of those overdoses resulted in death. The seven day period was July 17-23, 2017. With a number of partners from across Snohomish County, they took part in a first of its kind of data collection focused on opioid overdoses. The information represented reports from local fire, police, EMS, hospitals and clinics for the seven day period.
In other actions on opioids and the affects on families, Heather talked about two moms who lost sons to opioids and are working with the Snohomish County Health and other agencies to bring awareness to these epidemics in Snohomish County. The Warfield and the Lee families launched a website and have been talking to people and groups about how to address these issues. Heather mentioned a book called Dream Land that follows how we got into the opioid epidemic problem.
Thank you Heather Thomas for providing this information and your efforts in combating this insidious problem.