In the parking lot outside the First Church of God in Federalsburg, Md., at an intersection sparsely flanked by an auto parts store, a boxy warehouse and a few tired-looking houses, a white van quietly offers what many people in rural parts of Maryland desperately need but often can’t get: treatment—and genuine understanding—for opioid use disorder.
The 38-foot Mobile Treatment Unit (MTU) operated by the Caroline County Health Department is part doctor’s office, part counseling center and part support group meeting. Clients board, meet with a registered nurse in the back to check their vitals, enter a booth outfitted for virtual visits to see a doctor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) in Baltimore, stop at a restroom to give a urine sample, and wrap up by chatting with a substance use counselor in her office in the front of the RV.
A patient’s guide through the process, though, is a peer—someone who’s experienced the ravages of addiction and can listen without judgment to the stories people using drugs may be too ashamed to tell a doctor or a nurse: the sex traded for drugs, the possessions stolen from relatives and pawned, the children neglected in the haze of a heroin high.
On this mild June Monday, Jessica Anthony is a burst of color in an otherwise drab landscape. Sporting an orange chevron dress and a blond pixie cut, she is as bubbly as you’d expect a woman who never leaves the house with unpainted toes to be.
Today, Anthony is observing how the MTU’s staff handles patient visits, but it wasn’t long ago that she was on the other side, climbing the van’s steps to get help for an addiction to methamphetamine and prescription opiates. Now, she’s part of a University of Maryland, College Park study examining how peer treatment can be a bulwark for recovery—a project with sweeping possibilities that stretch from this rural hamlet to struggling neighborhoods in Baltimore to impoverished shantytowns on the other side of the world.
- Continue reading this article at Maryland Today.
- To learn more about CESAR's PRISM project research, click here.
PHOTO: A Caroline County Health Department van carries counselors for opioid use disorder to rural areas. A UMD researcher is studying the effect of peer support in clients' treatment.
Photo by John T. Consoli
