Reflections from PHI’s 2019 National Opioid Leadership Summit

PHI's 2019 National Opioid Leadership Summit—held this month in Sacramento—was an incredible success. Thank you to all who attended and participated! Practitioners, advocates and researchers in public health, health care and criminal justice came together to share informed, heartfelt and urgent contributions to addressing this critical health crisis. The expertise in that room was not just on the stage, it was at every table.

I looked around during the roundtable exercise and was amazed to see how deeply each group was engaged. You were working collaboratively, listening to each other, sharing your own experiences and solutions, and creating interventions that were thoughtful, successful and doable. What I realized at that moment was what made the event so important. Each of you was there because you wanted to stop people from dying from this terrible crisis.

I also heard new ideas being sparked. When Dr. Monica Bharel (Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, pictured right with the U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams and Jeff Reynoso, Executive Director of the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California), shared that every med student who graduates in Massachusetts is now trained in how to assess opioid use disorder and prescribe treatment, a group of medical practitioners were soon in the hallways planning how to make that happen in California. (Stay tuned!)

This was exactly the kind of synergy and momentum I had hoped for. I want to say thank you again, but please know that I don't want our work with each other to end. Below you will find some of the notes taken by our graphic facilitators, LizardBrain, as a reminder of what we talked about (click to see them enlarged). I'll be sharing more of the graphics we collected, as well as next steps for moving your ideas and contributions from the summit forward, in the weeks to come. You can also see a nice wrap-up of all the days events here on Twitter.

The event would not have been as successful without the leadership and keynote from U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, each of our speakers, and all of our sponsors: The California Department of Health Care Services, the California Health Care Foundation, The California Endowment, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and Kaiser Permanente.

Thank you again, for your dedication to this work, and for coming together.

Best,
Mary Pittman
CEO and President
Public Health Institute

Graphic Notes from PHI's 2019 National Opioid Leadership Summit