Los Angeles Christian Health Centers has been serving the Skid Row community in Downtown Los Angeles since 1995. In this session, we will review best practices in healthcare for people experiencing homelessness. We will discuss how to provide care that is patient-centered, trauma-informed, and recovery-oriented, and we will explore how we can best be the hands and feet of Jesus to our most vulnerable neighbors.
While recent news has focused on COVID-19, people who use drugs have been hit even harder by the opioid overdose epidemic in this current fentanyl era. The goal of this workshop is to discuss a new paradigm for buprenorphine treatment: the primary goal of treatment is to prevent fatal overdose; the key outcome we measure is retention in care. Such a care model emphasizes starting and staying on buprenorphine using a low-barrier, patient-centered approach grounded in harm reduction principles. We will focus on strategies for serving highly vulnerable populations, including those who are unsheltered, use polysubstances, and/or have serious mental illness. We will highlight new strategies including microdosing, long acting injectables, and telemedicine.
