By Shannon Lukens.
Moffat County Public Health is putting together an Opioid Fatality Review Team, with help from Memorial Regional Health and other local partners. They ask that you reach out to public health if you have had a friend or family member who has died of substance abuse.
Moffat County Public Health Nurse Becky Copeland says they want to help and see if there is something that could have been done to prevent that death.
“I think that our community is in a place where we are ready to take action. We don’t want to sit back and take it anymore. And if we can put interventions into place to help people keep them alive long enough until they’re ready to get help then that’s what we should do and we owe it to our community to do that.”
If someone you know has experience a substance-related death, call Moffat County Public Health at 970-291-8742
Here is the full message from Moffat County Public Health.
Moffat County Public Health and other local partners are teaming up to combat substance related deaths in our community. We have convened a panel of local health care providers, law enforcement officials, and other community affiliates to review local deaths within our community, involving substances. The goal of this team is to identify areas of missed opportunity throughout a person’s life, which if addressed, may have led to a different outcome.
We understand that this can be a sensitive and difficult matter to discuss, and want you to know that compassion, understanding, and confidentiality are our top priorities.
With this in mind, we would like to ask for the community’s help in recognizing protentional substance involved deaths, within our area. If you have lost a loved one to a death involving substance use, are the legal next of kin, and think a review of the circumstances would be beneficial and help reduce the possibility of future deaths, please call Becky Copeland RN, with Moffat County Public Health, at 970-291-8742. Together we can identify gaps with in our community make a difference!