Mississippi Public Health Institute

Southwest MS Substance Opioid Abuse Response (SW SOAR): The program focuses on pregnant, parenting, and parenting-aged women, in seven rural counties in southwestern Mississippi: Adams, Amite, Claiborne, Franklin, Jefferson, Pike, and Walthall. The program addresses each of the key activities with a focus on helping women, their families, and their communities access prevention education, treatment, and recovery resources. Women with OUD often require a broad range of services to support their treatment and recovery since they can experience substance use disorders and opioid use disorder (SUD/OUD) differently from men both due to hormonal differences and/or societal gender roles. Women and families in these rural and under-resourced communities face additional barriers to receiving treatment, including limited access to treatment, significant stigma, limited access to social safety net services, and interactions with the criminal justice system. To address the needs of women with SUD/OUD, SW SOAR will provide wraparound resources that will create and sustain new SUD/OUD prevention and treatment activities. Using the strengths of existing services, MSPHI and its consortium members will deploy interventions that focus on workforce development for therapists, counselors, community health workers, Department of Mental Health counselors, patient support specialists, and health care providers in Adams, Amite, Claiborne, Franklin, Jefferson, Pike, and Walthall counties. The aim is to bring services to pregnant and parenting women at-risk or with SUD/OUD identified through various referral sources. The overarching goal is to create a sustainable, integrated, multi-disciplinary mental and physical health care system that reduces morbidity and mortality of substance use disorder and opioid use disorder in pregnant and parenting women in priority rural counties. The consortium aims to do this by focusing on developing the workforce to increase access to care, improving data and technological systems to give a foundation for referrals and data reporting, engaging additional community members for local buy-in and sustainability, and reducing stigma of SUD/OUD among professionals and the general community.