United Indian Health Services, Inc. (UIHS) is located on the North Coast of California in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties and encompasses the ancestral lands of the Wiyot, Hupa, Tolowa, Karuk, and Yurok Tribes. As a 50l(c)(3) non-profit healthcare organization with over 54 years of experience serving American Indians and Alaskan Natives, UIHS functions as the primary source of medication for addiction treatment and behavioral health care for American Indian and Alaska Native community members. The UIHS Tribal Opioid Response Project will build on existing programmatic success with substance use prevention, harm reduction, treatment and recovery, continuing to increase access to cultural activities, deliver quality, trauma-informed and culturally responsive education, increasing access to harm reduction materials, and amplifying practical supports for clients, recovery groups, youth, families and surrounding communities. Project team will help provide enhanced supports for the substance use disorder programs within the UIHS Behavioral Health Department and the medication for addiction treatment programs within the UIHS Medical Department. This project team will increase access to naloxone and other opioid overdose reversal medications and promote enhanced education in our local schools, partners programs, clinics, crisis teams, first responders, and key community organizations with vital information regarding opioid use disorder as well as co-occurring substance use disorders.
This project will increase awareness to activities, services, and education provided by our UIHS Tribal Public Health and train service providers in culturally relevant and evidence-based treatment practices; thus, helping to improve service providers' capacity to interact appropriately with our American Indian and Alaska Native clients. This project will facilitate client access to recovery supports and increase regional awareness of the magnitude of the opioid epidemic problem in our local area. This project will directly reach at least 2,800 people annually and 14,000 people throughout the lifetime of the grant project. In our local tribal communities where we strongly subside within our local familial and tribal networks and the loss of even one person is felt by multitudes of individuals, families, community groups, tribal councils and tribal nations as a whole, this level of reach with have profound, positive impact for our local tribal communities.
In 2017, the Del Norte County opioid overdose death rate of 12.6 per 100,000 people, exceeded twice the California average5. Within Humboldt County, 24 people died due to opioid overdose in 2020, making the overdose death rate almost 40% higher than the state average6. In 2020, in Humboldt County American Indian and Alaska Native community members were 4.5 times more likely to die due to opioid overdose than their white counterparts6. This project will mitigate and curtail opioid related negative health outcomes for over 12,394 American Indian and Alaskan Native UIHS active clients who reside within the United Indian Health Services, Inc. service area.