Implementation Science Program

Goals: to facilitate and support the successful delivery of injectable opioid agonist treatment (iOAT) in Canada through educational resources, development of best practices and recommendations, and monitoring and evaluation.
Example activities: include developing guidelines for health providers and policy makers, a national scan of current iOAT services, developing a community of practice, and national research to evaluate the success of iOAT services.

Goals: to understand of the current state of practice by nurses for opioid addiction and develop recommendations to strengthen and expand the role of nurses in order to improve access and quality of care.
Example activities: a national scan of regulations, policies, and practices that identify the role of nurses in opioid addiction care, developing recommendations to expand the role of nurses and working towards implementing those recommendations, promoting nursing education, and piloting a clinic where a nurse care manager plays the central role in patient care.

Goals: to facilitate the engagement of people who use drugs throughout Canada by enhancing national peer networks. Peers will engage in implementation science projects and identify advocacy priorities to converge on a national set of actions to address the opioid crisis.
Example activities: creating a working group of people with lived experience to discuss and determine their own research priorities, conduct a survey on challenges and barriers to “peer” employment in harm reduction services, and understand experiences of opioid agonist treatment and associated discrimination and barriers.

Goals: to establish Opioid Agonist Treatment Guidelines for First Nations governed, community-based and residential treatment-based services.
Example activities: engagement with First Nations governed community-based, and residential treatment services providers, a literature review, a scan of community and treatment centres across Canada, and development of treatment guidelines.

Goals: to share knowledge and generate new evidence to support implementation of supervised consumption services in Canada.
Example activities: developing a national evidence-based guidance document and online resource repository, creating plain language resources explaining supervised consumption services, and a national scan of existing service models.

Goals: to understanding of the current status of the treatment of opioid use disorder within the psychosocial treatment system.
Example activities: surveying the range of current approaches to the treatment of individuals with opioid use disorder within psychosocial addiction treatment programs across Canada that do not include pharmacological agonist treatment, developing “good practice” descriptions, developing an intervention plan for improving treatment using psychosocial approaches.

Goals: to understand opioid use related interventions used in the correctional systems in Canada.
Example activities: writing a review of interventions for preventing harms or treating opioid addiction in corrections systems, evaluate the strategies currently in place in Ontario provincial prisons, study the transition from corrections back to the community, raise awareness about the opioid situation in prisons and its potential harms, and identify policies to reduce harm and create a safer environment.

Goals: to understand naloxone availability, distribution and standards regulations across Canada.
Example activities: environmental scan of naloxone distribution across Canada, development of a naloxone ‘Best Practice’ guideline, creation of a central database of Canadian data outcomes on naloxone distribution, and supporting further research on naloxone distribution.

Goals: address and improve practices in “detox” services.
Example activities: conducting an environmental scan of current institutional practices related to detoxification and withdrawal management services for opioid use disorders across Canada, review the scientific literature, and identify best practices.

Goals: to facilitate the implementation and delivery of drug checking programs.
Example activities: scanning drug checking services already or soon to be implemented in Canada and develop a web forum for knowledge transfer and dissemination, identify and synthesize the existing literature on drug checking services, and conduct surveys to determine locations in Canada where there is interest and willingness from people who use drugs to use these services and from providers to implement them.

Goals: to enhance access to opioid agonist treatment buprenorphine/naloxone in emergency departments.
Example activities: writing a systematic literature review of the use of buprenorphine in the emergency room, conducting a survey plus interviews on physicians in the emergency room on their attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge toward this treatment, and creating a toolkit to help physicians provide this treatment in the emergency room.

Goals: to provide additional evidence and develop guidance for the treatment of opioid use disorder among youth and young adults, and help scale-up interventions specifically for youth and young adults.
Example activities: writing a literature review on the interventions and treatments for opioid use disorder in youth and young adults, describe current services available for youth, conduct youth focus groups to discuss their needs, organize a whole day youth summit in each CRISM Node.