USDA tool helps rural communities address opioid crisis
Community Assessment Tool enables users to overlay substance misuse data against socioeconomic, census and other public information.
October 8, 2018
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has launched an interactive data tool to help community leaders build grassroots strategies to address the opioid epidemic.
“Under the leadership of President [Donald] Trump, USDA is committed to being a strong partner to rural America in addressing this monumental challenge,” Anne Hazlett, assistant to the secretary for rural development, said. “Local leaders in small towns across our country need access to user-friendly and relevant data to help them build grassroots solutions for prevention, treatment and recovery.”
The opioid misuse Community Assessment Tool enables users to overlay substance misuse data against socioeconomic, census and other public information. These data will help leaders, researchers and policy-makers assess what actions will be most effective in addressing the opioid crisis at the local level.
The Community Assessment Tool is free and available to the public. It can be accessed on USDA’s Rural Opioid Misuse webpage or at opioidmisusetool.norc.org.
USDA’s launch of the Community Assessment Tool closely follows Trump’s declaration of October as National Substance Abuse Prevention Month. Approximately 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, and 49,000 of those deaths involved an opioid. Many of the deaths were fueled by the misuse of prescription pain medications. The severity of the current opioid misuse crisis requires immediate action.
USDA's Rural Development partnered with the Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis at the University of Chicago's NORC to create the Community Assessment Tool.
NORC is a non-partisan research institution that delivers reliable data and rigorous analysis to guide critical programmatic, business and policy decisions. Today, government, corporate and nonprofit organizations around the world partner with NORC to transform increasingly complex information into useful knowledge. The Walsh Center focuses on a wide array of issues affecting rural providers and residents, including health care quality and public health systems.
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