On average, a person seeking youth addiction treatment would need to call nine providers to find one that offered buprenorphine, the only medication approved for the treatment of youth with opioid use disorder (OUD).
These results, and others like them, highlight serious gaps in access to evidence-based treatments in the residential addiction treatment segment, according to new research led by Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).
OHSU is a public research university that runs a system of hospitals and clinics across Oregon and southwest Washington.
Only 24% of residential addiction treatment facilities offer buprenorphine as part of their youth addiction treatment offerings for those aged 16 years and older, including those that do so in partnership with other health care providers.
“Residential treatment facilities provide an opportunity to reach young people with a range of evidence-based supports at a pivotal time in their lives, and it is crucial that buprenorphine is made available as one of those options,” Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), said in a news release related to the findings.
Youth addiction rates are down following the COVID-19 pandemic, different statistical sources suggest. But this particular slice of the behavioral health industry — providers that specialize in youth addiction — also struggles with several structural barriers to increasing access to care.
NIDA and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) supported the OHSU study.
Not only do many residential addiction treatment facilities not provide buprenorphine many actively push youth away from the treatment.
About 47% of the residential addiction treatment facilities that did not offer buprenorphine told OHSU researchers they would temporarily allow patients to continue taking it if it was prescribed by another provider, at least temporarily. Many would require the patient to stop taking it before discharge, the OHSU researchers found.
A smaller portion of facilities require patients not to be receiving buprenorphine as a condition of admission, OHSU noted in its work.
Other data show that youth overdose deaths have increased by 121% from 2010 to 2021. Total youth overdose deaths increased by about 30% from 2019 to 2020 and by 11% from 2020 to 2021.
OHSU researchers identified 354 residential addiction treatment facilities that represented that they treated youth, those aged 17 and younger, on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) database hosted at FindTreatment.gov.
Researchers verified that only 160 of those providers—less than half—actually provided youth addiction treatment.
Of the 24% of residential addiction treatment facilities that offer buprenorphine, a foundational component of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for OUD, only 11% offer buprenorphine in addition to ongoing treatment.
The lack of buprenorphine prescribing is not due to a lack of providers able to do so; 88% had a clinician on staff who could prescribe medication for psychiatric comorbidities.
“Therapeutic programming across facilities was unstandardized. Only half of the facilities reported including families in treatment,” the OHSU study states. “No other evidence-based treatment was used by more than one-third of facilities. Despite limited evidence of its efficacy, equine therapy was more common than buprenorphine use.”
Companies featured in this article:
National Institute on Drug Abuse, Oregon Health & Science University
