The Springfield-Greene County Health Department has identified substance use and mental health, which often go hand-in-hand, as top health concerns in Greene County for the last decade.
The department recently has proposed using some of the city's opioid settlement money to better understand and improve the systems that support people with substance use disorder and addiction.
SGCHD Director Katie Towns brought a special ordinance to City Council on Sept. 8 that would authorize the health department to use up to $500,000 of the city's Opioid Settlement Funds to conduct a Substance Use and Mental Health Asset Mapping project with the assistance of a third-party consultant. Council will vote on whether or not to approve the appropriation at its
Sept. 20 meeting.
"We want this to be a systematic look," Towns said. "Where are the gaps that are currently allowing people to slip through the process, and how do we use the integration of the systems — judicial, education, health care — to really find ways that we can make that fragmentation become more assured and have a continuum, a coordination of those assets that exist within those different systems?"
Since 2016, the health department has been working to better understand substance use disorder and a 2019 report identified three areas that needed more attention. In addition to collaborating with Centerstone (formerly Burrell Behavioral Health), Community Partnership of the Ozarks, the Aids Project of the Ozarks and the Springfield Fire Department, it also launched the Greene County Opioid Overdose Fatality Review Board in 2024.
Since its establishment, the board has reviewed 40 cases, Towns said, and identified a few common themes.
"What they have found is that often times these mental health challenges are co-occurring, so addiction is often coupled with mental health challenges; there's a lot of fragmented service deliver and follow-through care is often difficult to assure," Towns said. "Overall, the system needs improvement."
The mapping project would help the health department "launch a deep dive into the systems within our community that create the continuum of care" and how to improve those systems. The project would have multiple parts:
- An inventory of resources that defines resources by category such as prevention, early intervention, treatment and recovery;
- An assessment of accessibility, such as the capacity to care for people, insurance coverage and access points;
- An examination beyond health care and mental health care treatment to how substance use and mental health inter-relate to with educational, school-based resources, the judicial system and other systems;
- Findings and recommendations that the council could consider for future Opioid Settlement Fund uses.
Towns expects that, based on the first study, the mapping project could take about a year to two years.
Previously, the council gave the health department authority over $250,000 of the opioid settlement funds. Towns explained that the previous disbursement is being used for a community-based request for proposals, which includes hiring a coordinator for the Overdose Fatality Review Board. The department is also reviewing projects from Springfield Fire Department and Springfield Police Department that could also pull from that $250,000 fund. These would be separate projects from the mapping proposal.
According to Towns, Director of Finance David Holtmann reported that there is currently $5.7 million in the settlement fund.
Councilman Craig Hosmer praised the department for "a good start" toward a plan to better address the costly issue of substance use in the community, but questioned the need for $500,000.
"It seems a little high to me," Hosmer said.
Towns said that the study published in 2019 cost around $250,000. The health department, figuring for inflation, estimates the new study will cost $300,000 to $350,000.
"Then, that additional $150,000 is reserved for any sort of items that might come up along the way," Towns said. "In our first iteration, we ended up with a few different subject areas that the consultants said they would recommend we study further, but we ran out of resources. So this gives us a little additional (money) in case there are things that fall out of scope that we might not have anticipated."
Susan Szuch writes about health as well as local food and drink for the Springfield News-Leader. If you have feedback or story ideas, you can reach her at sszuch@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Health department seeks opioid settlement money for resource mapping
