{"id":113074,"date":"2016-05-24T16:04:54","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T20:04:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?post_type=school-college-post&#038;p=113074"},"modified":"2016-05-24T16:04:54","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T20:04:54","slug":"nursing-responds-opiate-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2016\/05\/nursing-responds-opiate-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Nursing responds to the Opiate Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Nursing responds to the Opiate Crisis <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The data are staggering. According to Connecticut\u2019s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, 415 people died of heroin overdoses in 2015. Connecticut\u2019s Senator Richard Blumenthal has called the opiate and heroin crisis a \u201cpublic health hurricane.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mental health nurse Dr. Annette Maruca, assistant clinical professor and an associate in the School of Nursing\u2019s Center for Correctional Health Networks, knows this reality from her practice. \u201cSubstance use disorders and mental illnesses are linked and share both risk factors and protective factors,\u201d she explained. \u201cUp to half of persons with a serious mental illness will develop a substance use disorder at some point in their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In her work with incarcerated citizens, Maruca observes that \u201cmental illness is disproportionately represented in corrections where an increasing number of persons with mental illness, including those who have co-occurring substance abuse disorders, have come into contact with the criminal justice system over the past decade.\u201d Well over half of inmates in state prisons and local jails have mental health problems.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBiochemical and\u00a0 neuroanatomical brain alterations occur with chronic substance use and influence a person\u2019s vulnerability to addiction,\u201d Maruca explained. \u201cUnlike the common belief that a person can \u2018just stop using,\u2019 research has shown that chronic use causes changes in the brain reinforcing the need for the substance.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There is hope, however. \u201cA community evidence-based intervention is Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT),\u201d Maruca said. \u201cCombining SBIRT with on-site medication-assisted treatments could become a routine practice in hospital settings to help address the opioid epidemic and prevent overdose deaths.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nursing responds to the Opiate Crisis The data are staggering. According to Connecticut\u2019s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, 415 people died of heroin overdoses in 2015. Connecticut\u2019s Senator Richard Blumenthal has called the opiate and heroin crisis a \u201cpublic health hurricane.\u201d Mental health nurse Dr. Annette Maruca, assistant clinical professor and an associate in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89,"featured_media":113075,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1877],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1876],"class_list":["post-113074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nur"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-01 20:58:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/89"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/113075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113074"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=113074"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=113074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}