Evaluating Virginia's State Opioid Response Grant (SOR): Year One

As recently as three weeks ago, the opioid epidemic was one of the largest public health crises facing America. With the onset of a global pandemic, public health has been thrust into a new spotlight, and attention has shifted to doing everything in our power to ‘flatten the curve’. Yet for many, addressing the behavioral health needs of ourselves, our families, and our communities remains critically important.

In a four-part series in the coming weeks, we will highlight key findings from one of OMNI’s behavioral health projects—an evaluation of the first year of Virginia’s State Opioid Response (SOR) grant.

While our primary lens will be to celebrate the many accomplishments and activities of this grant across prevention, treatment, and recovery, we will also share our emerging reflections on the profound impact that COVID-19 is having on our behavioral health partners in planning for and delivering services. We are rapidly integrating key questions into our ongoing evaluation, and documenting the creative ways that providers are pivoting to address needs, as well as capturing the many challenges that emerge in this day to day work. Stay tuned to read what we learn.

Getting Started

The State Opioid Response (SOR) grant is a federally funded formula grant distributed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). In Virginia, the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS) manages and distributes SOR funds and is taking a comprehensive, multi-pronged approach to ensure that they support state and local initiatives across the continuum of care—prevention, treatment, and recovery. A majority of the SOR funds are disbursed to the 40 Community Service Boards (CSBs) across the state and to five Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). These entities offer direct substance use disorder and opioid use disorder (OUD) programs and services to address prevention, treatment, and recovery in communities.

In addition to CSBs and FQHCs, several other Virginia state agencies and organizations are engaged as partners on the SOR grant. Implemented SOR strategies include:

• Prevention messaging campaigns to raise awareness of local opioid issues

• Education for healthcare providers and communities about preventing opioid misuse

• Distribution of drug deactivation packets, lock boxes, and smart pill bottles to reduce the availability of prescription drugs for misuse

• Provision of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for individuals with an opioid use disorder

• Naloxone (an opioid overdose reversal drug) training for community members and first-responders

• Funding to increase the number of peer recovery specialists in CSBs, emergency departments, and corrections facilities

• Expansion of collegiate recovery programs at nine Virginia colleges and universities

Virginia SOR initiatives align with the strategic goals of Virginia's Governor's Executive Leadership Team on Opioids and Addiction. Implementing strategies that are complementary to this team's action plan provides an opportunity to leverage state resources in addition to SOR funds to address Virginia's opioid crisis.

The Evaluation

In 2018, DBHDS hired OMNI to evaluate SOR grant efforts and support capacity building of funded grant recipients. OMNI’s focus over the first year was primarily on infrastructure building—figuring out not only what data we needed for a successful evaluation, but also who we were working with and what they needed from us in order to effectively and efficiently collect data and engage in evaluation activities. We knew that a strong foundation was imperative to capture the successes and challenges of the grant, and to effectively integrate real-time evaluation findings to guide program refinements for addressing the opioid crisis. As we created the evaluation plan, we thought about which data points were most important to measure the opioid epidemic and Virginia’s response.

We also developed training and technical assistance (TA) infrastructure to ensure Virginia agencies were supported in collecting and organizing data from around the state while they provide critical prevention, treatment, and recovery services to Virginians in need. Throughout the grant, we continue to provide training and TA services to facilitate high-quality data collection and to ensure that those from all populations and regions are represented in the data we use to report on SOR grant progress.

We are proud of the work that Virginia has accomplished and excited to share the results of our evaluation with you! Follow the link to learn more.