Welcome to our course, the Opioid Epidemic: From Evidence to Impact. We've put together this course in the face of massive epidemic around opioid use disorders for the purpose of bringing to our viewers the latest and the scientific evidence that can help inform how we understand opioid use disorders, what we can do to address them, and a set of recommendations that you can use to guide your work in your communities, in your workplace and any other venues that you might have an opportunity to advance the conversation about concrete steps we can take to reduce the impact of opioid use disorders in our society. My name is Shannon Frattaroli. I'm a faculty member here at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and I was one of several people who are responsible for the content that we're presenting in this course for you. In addition, I'd like to acknowledge several other people who were critical to the development of this course. Dr. Caleb Alexander is pictured here, as well as Dr. Andrea Gielen, and a picture of myself, and a special thanks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein. This team together represents clinical expertise, behavioral expertise and policy expertise. In essence, a multi-disciplinary team that's really essential to effectively addressing the opioid epidemic and having a conversation that's informed by a diverse array of evidence from multiple disciplines that can really speak to what we need to do in order to reduce the effects of opioid use disorders in our society. I'd also like to acknowledge, in the preparation of this course, the important role that a few organizations have played. The Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness here at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, as well as the Center for Injury Research and Policy, and the Bloomberg American Health Initiative. Those are all institutions within our School of Public Health here in Baltimore. Importantly, we've partnered through a number of years at this point with The Clinton Foundation, and they've been instrumental in terms of bringing a perspective on different stakeholders to the table and really being an important part of the dialogue so that we can make sure that the evidence that exists to inform our understanding of the opioid epidemic and how to address it is informed by what is happening in society at the community level, in government and in the private sector as well. This course really came about through a multi-year process, and I'd like to point to the start of it back in 2014 when our school, along with the Clinton Foundation, hosted a Town Hall and Expert Meeting. The link here that's on the screen will take you to footage from that event. It was really the first time that we brought together a group of experts, looked at the evidence and talked through what that evidence meant in terms of how we can look forward and reduce the negative impacts that opioid use disorders were having at the time and continue to have in our communities around the country. We followed up that meeting with a report release, and it's the precursor to the report that accompanies this course, called the Prescription Opioid Epidemic: an Evidence-based Approach. With that initial report, we really focused our efforts on prescription opioids. With the changes that were occurring in the opioid epidemic between our initial efforts in 2014 and the years that followed, we revised our approach and expanded beyond prescription opioids to include all types of opioids. That effort is reflected in a 2017 report that we released called The Opioid Epidemic: From Evidence to Impact. We released that report and hosted a meeting here at the School of Public Health as well. Again, on your screen, you can see a link to the footage from that event. You can watch that event and enjoy the discussion and dialogue from a number of experts that gathered from around the country to talk about this epidemic, to talk about the concrete recommendations that we put forward in the report, and to think concretely about solutions moving forward. Finally, we are very pleased to be releasing this report in the format of this course itself. So this is the latest evolution in our efforts with the Clinton Foundation to really bring evidence to inform policy and action, and address the opioid epidemic in the United States. We have three main objectives for this course. We want to explain the basics of the epidemic itself. How many people are being affected? What do the trends over time look like? Who within our population is most affected? We wanted to make sure that people who are participating in this course have a solid understanding for the numbers and trends behind the epidemic. We also want to assure that this course provides people with a way to discover how their own conceptions and life experiences may influence how they regard the causes and appropriate responses to the epidemic. At this point, many, probably most of us have been personally affected by the opioid epidemic, and it's important to understand how those experiences are going to affect how we understand the available evidence and the kinds of solutions that we put forward in order to address the trends that we're going to be talking about. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we want to convey through this course concrete evidence-based approaches that learners, communities, very broadly defined, can employ to reduce opioid-related deaths and injuries. So again, I say this is probably the most important objective because we want to make sure that you walk away from this course with a number of concrete solutions that you can be confident are rooted in the evidence, and that if implemented well, represent the best approaches we have at this point in time for addressing the opioid epidemic in our communities. I've made a couple of references to written materials that we've developed through this process. So to accompany this course, we want to assure that you have access to the report that's pictured here, The Opioid Epidemic: From Evidence to Impact. So that's available as part of this course offering. It's also available on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health website to freely download and read through, share with friends and family, and take in the information that we've assembled in this report. In addition to this report, we're also going to include some supplementary readings that we think will complement nicely both the report and the content that we're providing through this course. Just to step back and emphasize that the basic goal that we have with this course is to provide you, our learners, which include public officials, health professionals and concerned citizens, with a comprehensive overview of the science and public health rationale behind solutions to the epidemic, and it's our greatest hope that with this information you will have tools to act concretely in your communities around the world.
