Staff photo | Executive Director Markey Farley, left, welcomes the new Certified Peer Recovery Specialists joining the UC Recovery team.
This article was originally published by NewsTalk 94.1 and can be found by clicking here.
UCHRA has assigned a certified peer recovery specialist to every county in the Upper Cumberland to help with opioid addiction.
Executive Director Mark Farley said these specialists are all people who have struggled with addiction and are in long-term recovery themselves. Farley said the program has been designed to be more proactive than many other addiction treatment measures.
“There’s always going to be those individuals that get sentenced to us by a judge, but what we want to do is try to help those individuals before they get to that point,” Farley said. “So this program is designed to work with physicians and pharmacists to help them better understand the signs of early addiction and they can refer those individuals to us.”
Farley said the specialists will represent all the communities in the region and connect those in need with the right resources. Farley said the specialists are currently in training and will hopefully be doing hands-on work in their counties soon.
“It’s not easy to deal with individuals that’s going through this process,” Farley said. “They need support themselves to help them understand how to stay emotionally strong themselves and not to relapse because they’re dealing with individuals that are constantly in that situation.”
Farley said the program is funded by opioid abatement money and meant to treat opioid addiction but will not turn anyone who needs help away. Farley said he thinks their success will be measured by how many people they can keep in long-term recovery.
“We’ll be tracking those metrics that show those signs and hopefully at the end of our grant period we’ll be able to say to the state this is a model that can be replicated in other regions,” Farley said. “If I’m correct we may be the only truly regional entity that’s trying to put something like this in place and we hope it’s something that can be done in other places as well.”
Farley said UCHRA is working with a network of providers to make sure they have appropriate treatment measures for those who need it.
“Hopefully we’re reaching them much earlier in that process when they first start down that road of addiction,” Farley said. “Some of this will come through family referrals. A mom, a dad, a grandmother, grandfather who are starting to worry about their grandchildren or their children themselves showing some signs. That’s a perfect situation for us to step in very early on to try and encourage them to get treatment and then, once they come out of that treatment, to provide them the wraparound services they need to be successful.”
