In a new webinar on Dec. 12, the AMA and Manatt Health will highlight leading physicians, other health care professionals and advocates taking action to fight the nation’s drug overdose and death epidemic.
In 2021, drug-related overdose deaths topped 107,000. Despite a nearly 50% decrease in opioid prescribing over the past decade, drug overdose mortality continues to trend in the opposite direction. In particular, drug-related deaths have disproportionately impacted Black, American Indian, Native Alaskan Americans and young people.
The staggering data drives home the need for evidence-based policy and leadership to reduce drug-related overdoses. The AMA and Manatt Health released a national policy roadmap (PDF) in Dec. 2020 with detailed recommendations for policymakers. In 2022, the AMA and Manatt launched a more comprehensive state toolkit (PDF) that identified specific laws, regulations and other initiatives that demonstrated success. Now, in this webinar, they highlight leading physicians, other health care professionals and advocates taking action across the six areas that were the focus of these reports:
- Increasing access to evidence-based treatments to help patients with a substance use disorder (SUD)
- Ensuring access to addiction medicine, psychiatry and other trained physicians
- Improving access to multidisciplinary, multimodal care for patients with pain
- Enforcing mental health and SUD parity laws
- Expanding harm reduction efforts to reduce death and disease
- Enhancing public health data surveillance, monitoring and evaluation
Register for this webinar on Dec. 12 at noon, Central, to join Patrice A. Harris, MD, MA, former AMA president and chair of the AMA Substance Use and Pain Care Task Force, and Bobby Mukkamala, MD, immediate past chair of the AMA Board of Trustees and chair of the AMA Substance Use and Pain Care Task Force, in their discussion of these topics.