A new report says between 2014 and 2021, opioid-related deaths among teens and young adults have tripled in Ontario.
And in a situation like this, knowledge is power to do something about it.
But there are some issues in acquiring local and timely data on the matter, says the head of the Guelph Wellington Drug Strategy (GWDS).
"Now that we have lived through a fulsome public health emergency response focused on the pandemic, we know what to expect from an extensive and focused data tracking process," said Adrienne Crowder, the manager of the GWDS. "Namely real time updates, multiple data points, trends over time, data broken down by age groups, location, etc."
The report, from the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network at Unity Health Toronto, says the 15 to 24-year-old age group has seen 752 deaths in those seven years in Ontario.
There were 169 deaths across the province during the first year of the pandemic, compared with 115 the year before.
But there is no local breakdown of those numbers. The most recent local data on youth and opioid use came in a 2020 report by the WGDS, but didn't have numbers on local opioid-related deaths among youth.
Crowder said it's "night and day" the differences in available data on drug overdose deaths compared to COVID-19. And not having that local data in a timely manner has an effect.
"Working in a relative data vacuum makes targeted interventions impossible," Crowder said. "Which means risks are not mitigated in a thoughtful, strategic way."
Crowder believes there isn't a health or other bureaucracy responsible for tracking deaths, other than the coroner's office. And that data isn't easily accessible, and takes time to be released.
"The release of data from the coroner’s office is months and months after-the-fact – so having accurate data is a constant problem," she said. "This can make an organization like the drug strategy appear incompetent since we can’t provide reliable data, but the problem is that the data is not available in a timely way."
There are also inconsistencies from one public health unit to another when it comes to how data is collected.
There is the Public Health Ontario online tool, but data includes the entire public health catchment area, so Wellington's data gets grouped in with Dufferin County's numbers.
As well, Crowder points out drug poisonings aren't consistently counted.
"If there is another primary medical issue, i.e. heart failure, etc. – the death is coded as that issue, not as a drug poisoning," she said. "So the data skews to being under-reported."
The FAST system, used by Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health, tracks drug poisoning fatality data weekly in Guelph, but not in the county. While Crowder said "it is better than no data," it does come with challenges.
The data, she said, is dependent on multiple sources, and has some reliability and validity issues.
"It provides information about fatalities known to Guelph Police Services," she said. "(But) it under-reports total drug poisoning events because it has limited data sources, it doesn’t include GGH or EMS data, (and) coding of drug poisoning fatalities is not consistent across different organizations, so not all drug poisoning deaths are coded as such."
Crowder added the data from FAST and the coroner's office isn't the same, and needs to be reconciled. But a timeline to do so isn't clear.
In the meantime, local officials are doing what they can with the data they have.
Crowder said they've been able to follow through on a couple of the recommendations in its 2020 report.
That includes securing a $1 million federal grant last year for Wyndham House to operate a walk-in, barrier-free treatment hub with nursing, psychiatry, peer workers, counselling, case management and more for at-risk youth.
They've also worked with the Community Resilience Coalition to look at early intervention, as well as building protective factors for youth to reduce long-term substance use.
Crowder also pointed to a needs assessment conducted earlier this year with The Grove Hubs, to gather information on the substance use educational needs for staff and volunteers.
