The Blue Guardian Program.

AuthorKocis, Julia E.
PositionOpioid addiction treatment service in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania

BLUE GUARDIAN IS AN INITIATIVE among the Lehigh County, PA District Attorney, the Lehigh County Regional Intelligence and Investigation Center (RIIC), police departments in Lehigh County, the Lehigh County Department of Drug & Alcohol, and treatment providers. The program leverages the existing relationships between police and their communities to assist individuals and their families plagued by opioid addiction in accessing treatment. When law enforcement successfully uses Naloxone/Narcan to reverse the effects of an opioid related overdose, a uniformed officer of the appropriate municipality and a Certified Recovery Specialist ("CRS") make a joint home visit within 48-72 hours post incident. The appropriate municipality is considered the governing municipality where the individual resides. For example, if the Allentown (PA) Police Department has administered the naloxone, but the individual resides in Bethlehem, PA a Bethlehem police officer is part of the home visit team.

The purpose of the visit is to engage the family and provide access to resources (family codependency, family intervention and/or family support group) and to encourage the individual to enter treatment. Many times, after the overdose event, the individual agrees to treatment at the hospital which is considered a warm hand-off. For those that do not, the home visit is used to attempt to reengage the individual. A secondary and unique impact of the joint home visit is changing...

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