Women

September 2023 is National Recovery Month and HRSA’s Office of Women’s Health has a toolkit to support organizations and health care providers that care for women living with opioid use disorder (OUD). The toolkit provides strategies to engage women with OUD, care coordination for support, and other resources.

This presentation will focus on the relationship between trauma and substance use as it relates to treatment for women, as well as a discussion of impactful trauma-informed and gender-responsive interventions. The evidence-based interventions will be based on Seeking Safety and Finding Your Best Self models, both of which are present-focused and easily implemented in any treatment setting.

Researchers looked at survey responses from women of reproductive age across eight rural U.S. regions to determine the association between contraceptive use and SUD treatment, healthcare utilization, and substance use.

Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a public health crisis affecting women, men, children, and society.1 Women with OUD have unique care needs and require a broad range of medical, behavioral health, and social services to meet these needs. Care coordination is important to manage the array of services that might be delivered to women in different settings. Without care coordination, women with OUD might struggle to access the services they need to get treatment and maintain recovery.

This presentation highlighted the intersection of discrimination, women, substance use and reproductive rights from historical and current perspectives. It then provided methods and techniques for eliminating stigma and discrimination on a provider-patient level and provide an opportunity for the audience to practice compassionate care.

In this context, the overarching aim of this document is to inform and encourage governments, policy–makers, and other partners to take the necessary actions to implement evidence-based prevention strategies and treatment services for substance use disorders in order to provide everybody, girls as well as boys, and women as well as men, with the skills and opportunities to prevent the initiation of unhealthy behaviours and, in case of individuals who use drugs and suffer from drug use disorders, with the optimal support for improving their life circumstances.

This toolkit is designed primarily for substance use and child welfare practitioners, as well as other service providers and health system planners who offer services to, or design services with, pregnant women and new mothers who use substances. Much is changing in the substance use and child welfare fields to bring forth approaches that are culturally safe, trauma informed, harm reduction-oriented and participant-driven. This toolkit highlights these advances and invites people working in both systems to think about how we can continue to improve our work, in partnership with the women who use these services.

The curriculum focuses on the effects of substance abuse on families, parenting, and the parent-child relationship, incorporating Joan and Eric Erickson’s eight themes of growth spanning the life cycle and the Stone Center’s Self-in-Relation theory of women’s development. Combining experiential and didactic exercises, this approach is designed to enhance parents’ self-awareness and thereby increase understanding of their children.

Lessons Learned From Listening Sessions With Five Tribes in Minnesota.

Medications for opioid use disorder, including buprenorphine hydrochloride and methadone hydrochloride, are highly effective at improving outcomes for individuals with the disorder. For pregnant women, use of these medications also improves pregnancy outcomes, including the risk of preterm birth. Despite the known benefits of medications for opioid use disorder, many pregnant and nonpregnant women with the disorder are not receiving them.