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Research letter
Implementing peer recovery coaches to increase linkages to recovery services among patients with substance use disorders seen in emergency departments
  1. Joseph Carpenter1,2,
  2. Umedjon Ibragimov3,4,
  3. Alaina Steck1,2,
  4. Tatiana Getz5,
  5. Yan Li1,
  6. Nicholas Giordano5
  1. 1Department of Emergency Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  2. 2Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  3. 3Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  4. 4College of Nursing, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
  5. 5Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Joseph Carpenter; jecarpe{at}emory.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/emermed-2023-213700

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    Emergency department (ED) encounters among patients experiencing non-fatal opioid-involved overdoses continue to increase.1 Across Georgia, ~13 000 non-fatal drug-involved overdoses present to EDs, annually. Patient interventions capable of ensuring timely access to recovery services following these encounters are warranted. Peer recovery coaches (PRCs) are persons in long-term recovery from substance use disorders (SUD) who leverage their experience to serve as liaisons between patients and clinicians, and aid patients in navigating SUD recovery services.2 3 PRCs are active in the Atlanta community, trained and independently certified by a credentialing organisation endorsed by the state. PRCs help to reduce ED utilisation and improve care outcomes4; however, ED infrastructure and scarcity of qualified personnel limit access to PRCs. Before hiring PRCs in our ED, a large public hospital with a Level I trauma centre seeing >150 000 annual encounters, recovery service referrals were clinician-driven and not formalised. We sought to improve our referral programme and identified PRCs as a …

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    Footnotes

    • Handling editor Mary Dawood

    • Contributors JC oversaw programme implementation, supervision, funding acquisition, data collection and writing and revising the original draft. JC, NG and TG oversaw data management, analyses and visualisation. All authors contributed equally to the drafting and revising of the manuscript.

    • Funding This work was supported by funding from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (R01CE003509).

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research. Refer to the Methods section for further details.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.