WPA Signed a Letter of support for Wisconsin Opioid Overdose Response Center Funding; View the full letter here. 

The Wisconsin Opioid Overdose Response Center will focus on a systematic effort to build a sustainable and resilient community pharmacy-centric infrastructure that can change the trajectory of the opioid epidemic in communities across Wisconsin. The proposed center has four specific public service goals that focus on education and outreach.

Goal #1 – Establish a pharmacy-focused center at UW-Madison that is capable of developing, implementing, and communicating successful strategies to combat the opioid and fentanyl crisis in Wisconsin.

Goal #2 – Increase patient access to evidence-based treatments for opioid use disorder and opioid overdose through expansion of community pharmacy-based services in Wisconsin.

Goal #3 – Increase the capacity of pharmacies and pharmacists in Wisconsin to access and deploy evidence-based educational materials and programs focused on opioid misuse and overdose risk mitigation strategies.

Goal #4 – Develop new technologies suitable for use by Wisconsin pharmacists and pharmacies to prevent overdose from existing and emerging synthetic opioid molecules.

To achieve these goals, the center will establish a distributed Wisconsin Opioid Overdose Pharmacy Resource Network involving patients, prescribers, veterans, and community leaders from across the state, beginning with partners that include the Wisconsin Psychiatry Association. Working closely with network members, we will leverage our expertise to optimize use of existing tools and develop the next generation of approaches used to combat fentanyl and synthetic opioid overdoses, and to deliver these interventions to citizens across the state through community pharmacies.

Efforts to scale our educational and outreach initiative across multiple sites within an improved resource network will both immediately support community efforts to adopt pharmacy-centric evidence-based interventions that deliver MOUDs to individuals not otherwise being reached, disseminate fentanyl specific prevention and treatment services, and build toward long-term resilience by creating conditions and the infrastructure to enable rapid uptake of new detection and overdose reversal approaches