Page 14 - Christiana Care Focus November 2018

Medication, pain-management options can help treat opioid addiction
More than 170 attend Sixth Annual Addiction Medicine Symposium
345 people died
in Delaware from overdose in 2017 —
12 percent higher than 2016.
Albert White was 13 when he started using opioids. By the time he was 72, he’d been married three times. “I loved the drugs more,” he said. He was ill, and his house was in foreclosure. Suicide seemed like the only solution. A social worker took White to Christiana Hospital, where he met Terry Horton, M.D., medical chief of Addiction Medicine at Christiana Care. White now takes Suboxone to help combat opioid addiction. He hasn’t used opioids for two years.
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by Christiana Care Health System and Central East ATTC, a program of the Danya Institute, which offers training, leadership and organizational development to behavioral health care providers and consumers.
Janice E. Nevin, M.D., MPH, president and CEO of Christiana Care, in her opening remarks underscored the need for action. In 2017, 345 people died in Delaware from overdoses, a 12 percent increase from 2016, she said. In August 2018 alone, 39 people in Delaware died from overdoses. It was the highest monthly total ever reported, since 2013 when the Department of Health and Social Services began tracking deaths from suspected overdoses.
“To solve this epidemic, we need to work together with renewed urgency and bring innovative solutions to this crisis,” she said. “We need to partner together in new ways to achieve success.”
12 CHRISTIANA CARE HEALTH SYSTEM
hite was a panelist at the Sixth Annual Addiction Medicine Symposium, held on Sept. 25 in John M. Clayton Hall at the University of Delaware. More than 170 physicians, nurses, social workers and counselors attended the event, which was sponsored