As a new support for people battling drug addiction, Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics and Cottage Health have opened the Bridge Clinic near Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital to provide treatment and other services.
The Bridge Clinic has walk-in and appointment services including counseling, medication-assisted treatment, psychiatric evaluation and treatment, non-opioid pain management, and psychosocial resources, all in one location.
SBNC and Cottage Health hosted an event this week at the hospital amphitheater to share more information about the Bridge Clinic’s first 10 weeks of operation.
“We now have an urgent care for addiction problems,” said Paul Erickson, medical director for psychiatry and addiction medicine at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. “One of the key concepts of the Bridge Clinic is access to treatment is easy.”
So far, the Bridge Clinic has served more than 67 people and 206 total appointments, for people ranging from the ages of 22 to 82.
More than 30 patients at the Bridge Clinic have been diagnosed with opioid dependence, 11 with alcohol dependence, six with stimulants, and three patients reporting with sedative, hypnotic or anxiolytic dependence.
Patients enter the program voluntarily through screening and brief intervention at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital or Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics, with walk-in access, Erickson said.
A key element of the Bridge Clinic is helping a patient with insurance enrollment, benefits, housing and community treatment referrals.
The clinic at 2320 Bath St., Suite 302, is open from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, and is available to all residents diagnosed with a substance use disorder.
Patients requiring long-term substance use disorder counseling are referred to other community treatment such as the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, Sanctuary Centers of Santa Barbara, other Cottage Hospital programs, the Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness and Aegis Treatment Centers.
William Paule, addiction medicine specialist at Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics, said fatal drug overdoses in America keep rising “at an alarming rate.”
“There are solutions, and we are already implementing the solutions, so there is hope,” Paule said at this week’s event.
In addition to opioids, the Santa Barbara community faces challenges with marijuana, alcohol, benzodiazepines and sedatives, methamphetamine, cocaine, psychedelic drugs, dextromethorphan (used in cough medicines) and MDMA (also known as ecstasy or molly).
“This is not just opioids,” Paule told the crowd.
Over the past 30 months, substance abuse issues prompted more than 1,700 unduplicated patient visits to the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital emergency department, said Ron Werft, Cottage Health’s president and CEO.
This is an average of 57 patients a month, or nearly two people a day, Werft said.
He also said Santa Barbara County ranked sixth per capita in California in emergency room encounters for heroin overdoses, according to California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.
Between 40 to 70 people died of overdose deaths in Santa Barbara County in the last year, a number higher than the national average, Werft said.
Werft emphasized the importance of a bridge program linking substance use disorder recovery to support and outpatient treatment programs.
“This idea of establishing a Bridge Clinic is to create an opportunity to identify patients at a time where they are more open than usual to intervention, and getting them promptly in front of professionals who can help them,” he said. “We believe this is going to have a big impact.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
