St. James Healthcare Foundation, Inc.

St. James Healthcare, founded by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth in Butte, Montana, in 1881, is the largest medical center in southwest Montana. In 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, St. James and its community partners, called the Southwest Montana Opioid and Substance Use Disorder Community Coalition, are using Rural Community Opioid Response Program—Implementation funding to reduce opioid-related mortality and morbidity among a targeted population of pregnant and parenting women through a coordinated, multi-sector response that strengthens and expands SUD/OUD prevention, treatment, and recovery services to enhance rural residents’ ability to access treatment and move toward recovery. The targeted rural counties are only 48.3% female, but 60.9% of all drug overdose cases at St. James’s emergency department are female, and the percent of total births with a positive neonatal drug screen in the targeted rural area is 4.2%, five times higher than across Montana as a whole. The Consortium’s proposed approach is rooted in maximizing existing local resources, leveraging statewide initiatives, and involving the stakeholders most directly impact by substance use disorder and opioid use disorder (SUD/OUD) to develop and implement an improved and sustainable continuum of services. The continuum will include considerable focus on (1) prevention of SUD/OUD through stigma reduction, especially for pregnant and parenting women; (2) increasing access to treatment by helping more providers obtain waivers for medication-assisted treatment and coaching providers on SUD/OUD care for prenatal and perinatal women; and (3) developing a true recovery community across the area, with new peer support services, recovery navigation, and potential recovery housing to augment the sparse, 12-step-based recovery infrastructure currently available.