I hope everyone had a pleasant start to their Holiday Season for whichever religion you follow. Things went quite well in the battle against 0piates and treatment from my perspective, and when you see the overall numbers, I think you would agree.
For those that didn’t see the print media, visual media, or online social media, Safe Station had its 800th visit at 10:57 hours on Thanksgiving morning; 800 visits in 6 months; 80 percent of those visits were people coming in for the first time; 20 percent were repeat visitors struggling on the road to recovery, but ultimately being provided the services they need.
We have started to show some consistent positive hard evidence that our efforts on the law enforcement, medical, rescue, and community response to this crisis are beginning to work. Let’s take the past four months of data from 2016 and compare it to the data from 2015:
2015 ODs/Deaths 2016 • ODs/Deaths • DIFFERENCE
August 69/6 48/8 -21/+2
September 102/10 63/5 -39/-5
October 55/8 75/5 +20/-3
November 58/5 47/6 -11/+1
TOTAL 284/29 233/24 -51/-5
51 fewer overdoses. 5 fewer deaths. Countless numbers of families affected by this now have hope and still have their loved ones with them for this Holiday season because of the efforts of this entire community. You can’t argue with progress and you can’t argue with the data. The tides are turning, and we all now have an idea of what our role in this situation is. What we all do as a community works.
Christopher Hickey is Director of Emergency Services for the City of Manchester.
