One of the many challenges of Maine’s opioid epidemic is getting people into effective drug treatment as quickly as possible. A shortage of treatment providers means that some patients can wait weeks or months to be seen.
But in Brunswick, the Addiction Resource Center at Mid Coast Hospital has figured out how to cut those wait times to just a few days, and the effort appears to be paying off.
Two hundred seventy-two. That’s how many people lost their lives to drug overdoses in Maine last year. They were people who were young and old, from cities and towns. But Eric Haram of the Addiction Resource Center in Brunswick says not one of them was from the Bath-Brunswick area, and he thinks he knows why.
“We feel strongly that our partnerships with health care, primary care, local law enforcement, local sheriffs departments and, most importantly, managing low wait times to treatment and having medication-assisted treatment available are the reasons why we’ve seen that zero mortality rate here in these communities,” he says.
At the Addiction Resource Center, the medication used to treat opioid addiction is Suboxone in combination with individual and group therapy. The center treats about 800 patients a year for a full array of substance use disorders.
But over the past decade Haram says there’s been a 400 percent increase in the volume of patients seeking help in Brunswick, primarily for opioid addiction. And some are so desperate for help that they’re willing to drive five hours a day round trip for treatment.
Chris, who asked that we not use his last name, is one of them.
“I had looked into it a lot and pretty much everybody that I talked to said it was between four, six, nine months waiting period,” he says.
Chris says that was discouraging. He didn’t think he could make it.
Experts say when a person finally reaches the decision to get help, there’s only a small window to act on it. Otherwise, withdrawal sets in. The chance of relapse is high and the path to recovery is lost.
But Chris, who’s 28, was fortunate. His mother is helping him. She spent three days on the phone.
“She made a bunch of different calls with like 10 or 15 different people and she found this place down here that actually got me in within a week,” he says.
Chris’ mother, who asked not to be identified, says over the past decade she’s tried to convince Chris to get into treatment several times. Once he left Maine to try rehab out of state, but he says it didn’t work. He came back and tried to convince his family that he was clean. He says that didn’t work either.
Finally, Chris told his mother that he wanted to try medication-assisted treatment.
“That’s what really blew my mind is you would have someone get to that point and they said, ‘We have a wait list of six months.’ I said, ‘Six months? He might not even be alive in six months if we don’t pull him out of this.’ It’s been eight months to get through to him this time,” Chris’ mother says.
“If I could pick one factor that I think drives a positive prognosis for one of my patients it’s having strong family support,” says Dr. Leah Bauer, medical director at the Addiction Resource Center, where she leads a team of six physicians who prescribe medication for alcoholism and opioid dependency. “So whenever I see a patient who’s brought in by a family member, who has a family member that really wants to be involved actively in their treatment, I’d put my money down on that person still being with us a year down the road.”
Chris and his mom are still trying to figure out how they’ll drive from northern Maine to Brunswick and back every day for treatment. Renting a motel room is one option.
Bauer says their situation is not unusual. She says one of her patients from another part of the state even pitched a tent in Brunswick so he could get treatment for his addiction.
Haram says stories like these are why a state task force recently unanimously recommended expanding medication-assisted treatment as quickly as possible.
“What we’re talking about is a recommendation that can immediately stop withdrawal, rapidly decrease the intensity of craving and immediately reduces a person’s overdose risk by 50 percent when they begin that medication,” he says.
And Haram says it’s a service that can be integrated into any treatment facility, whether it’s residential or outpatient. He says the Brunswick center has been able to do it by providing support and infrastructure for doctors who treat patients on a part-time basis.
Cutting wait times, he says, has simply been a matter of making it a priority and becoming more efficient. Currently the average wait for an appointment ranges from 2 1/2 to 5 days. Haram says getting patients into treatment the same day they ask for help is the ultimate goal.
