Gail D’Onofrio MD, MS & Kathryn Hawk MD, MHS – Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, CT

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Gail D'Onofrio

Video length: 2:13

Transcript

Dr. Gail D’Onofrio speaking:

Welcome. I'm Dr. Gail D’Onofrio and a chief of emergency services here at Yale New Haven Hospital.

We're right here at York Street, now our largest emergency department that sees over a hundred thousand visits per year.

We were fortunate to be the first sight that conducted ED-initiated buprenorphine.

And after that study completed, we now have incorporated into our practice.

Katherine Hawk speaking:

My name is Katherine Hawk.

I'm an emergency physician here at Yale New Haven Hospital and I'm here to talk to you about how we are integrating our research into practice.

We've integrated ED-initiated buprenorphine into the care for many of our patients with opioid use disorder.

We also included overdose prevention education and naloxone distribution.

This is all built upon and in conjunction with project desert, which is our model of using health promotion advocates to help perform brief interventions and link patients to treatment.

Damaris Navarro speaking:

My name is Damaris Navarro. I'm a health promotion advocate at Yale New Haven Hospital.

My job is to help the doctors help the patients.

We know our community.

We know our patients. We meet them where they're at, give them resources, and become their voices between the patient and the doctor.

So in New Haven, we're lucky enough to have a variety of community resources for which we can refer our patients with substance use disorders.

Many of whom are linked through project desert.

We continue to refer patients to Dr. David Fiellin at our primary Yale campus and to doctors Jeanette Tetrault and Stephen Holt over in the same refills based addiction recovery program.

Dr. David Fiellin speaking: 

I'm Dr. David Fiellin. I'm a general internist primary care physician.

Patients who were initiated on buprenorphine in the emergency department would follow up in the primary care center here within 24 to 72 hours after their emergency department visit, and myself and my staff would evaluate the patient, and make sure that they were doing well with their medication, and had a successful induction onto buprenorphine.

We also have many community referral sites that we work with.

We refer patients to a local needle exchange, to our Department of Public Health, to community providers; including primary care providers and primary care based clinics.

We're excited to share all that we learned here at Yale New Haven Hospital, and we're even more excited to see all the emergency departments who've been able to adapt some of our processes.

And to move this further along so that we can really attack this opiate crisis.

And all together, we can improve the health of the public.