Arkansas

HCI will engage community partners to expand services to subpopulations with significant needs for and barriers to services and will develop continuity of care protocols with local hospitals and emergency services. HCI will open MAT Programs at its clinics in Malvern, AR (Hot Spring County), De Queen, AR (Sevier County) and Russellville, AR (Pope County). Services will begin immediately in Malvern as HCI has recently hired a DATA Waived physician to work at that clinic and has a DATA-Waived APRN who currently provides services there.

The Arkansas Rural Opioid Use Team Education Overdose Response program (AROUTE-OR) was developed in response to immediate needs in the target area for increased access to Substance Use Disorder (SUD) services in North Arkansas. The one-year project will build capacity of ten emergency departments (EDs) by implementing a nine-hour training and placement program that connects participating EDs with Peer Recovery Support Specialists (PRS) working in the region.

The purpose of this program is to implement and enhance robust, evidenced-based interventions and promising practice models that increase access to and strengthen the quality of SUD/OUD/AUD services in the areas of prevention, treatment, and recovery services in high-risk rural communities.

AFMC is a quality improvement organization, and leads Consortium members to establish the Arkansas Rural Taskforce for Opioid Response (ARTOR) with committed healthcare organizations and others with interests in substance- or opioid-use disorder (SUD/OUD) to launch foundational prevention, treatment, and recovery core activities in a six-county area in Arkansas.

The overarching goal of this program is to implement and enhance robust, evidenced-based interventions and promising practice models that expand access and strengthen the quality of SUD/OUD services in the areas of prevention, treatment, and recovery services in high-risk rural communities.

Our project endeavors to address the current need for substance use disorder (SUD) and mental illness (MI) treatment in rural Johnson County, Arkansas through four main initiatives. Each of our initiatives are directed by the following overarching goals: 1. Improve the quality and sustainability of SUD and behavioral health care services in our rural community. 2. Lower barriers to improve rural residents’ access to SUD and MI treatment. 3. Provide detoxification treatment and peer support services that are currently unavailable. 4.

The overarching goal of the Arkansas Rural Opioid Use Training and Education (A-ROUTE) Consortium is to connect and support a network of community partners, state agencies, peer support specialists, and healthcare teams in a comprehensive program focused on educating rural communities, destigmatizing opioid use disorders, linking scarce critical resources, and providing high-quality services that ultimately eliminate overdose deaths.

In response to the significant burden of opioid use disorder (OUD) within rural Arkansas as demonstrated by prescribing rates more than double the national average, the A-ROUTE Project proposes to develop a technical assistance (TA) center for prevention and intervention of opioid use disorders in primary care. The project will complete an environmental scan and assessment to identify practices to engage the OUD population, investigate resource gaps and workforce training barriers for OUD in rural communities in Arkansas.

Beyond Opioids is a collaborative project between Legal Aid of Arkansas and Center for Arkansas Legal Services to provide free civil legal services to eligible individuals impacted by opioid use disorder and substance use disorder.