Q&A with Lydie Ultimo-Prophil, Vice President of Addiction Services
Q: How do feel the work done by within Addiction Services particularly reflects or carries forward the Bay Cove mission?
Lydie: Bay Cove’s first program in 1974 was Andrew House detox, and I feel that the work we do is carrying the torch for that original service. We have built upon that flagship program and have, within Addiction Services, branched into 14 sites treating people all along the recovery continuum.
Bay Cove is also committed to collaboration, and our service area works well with all our other service areas to offer supports to individuals with co-occurring conditions, as well as our outside collaborating agencies and funders to make sure that everyone who needs help gets it—whether it’s at one of our programs or somewhere else.
Q: Talk about the effect that the pandemic has had on individuals with addiction issues.
Lydie: The pandemic has been hard on everyone, but it’s been truly brutal on individuals with substance use disorder. Imagine that you have those struggles to begin with—and now imagine that you’ve spent the last year-plus in various degrees of lockdown. The effect that’s had on the routines that are so crucial to people in recovery. Add in the stressors of job loss, relationship losses/distance from those you care about, anxiety about contracting COVID…
This is what we consider trauma on top of trauma, and we are seeing people who aren’t currently using being more apt to use, and people who are using, using more. The opioid epidemic was already here—we’ve been living through it. Now, we have a pandemic in the middle of an epidemic. The fact that overdoses are spiking locally and nationally is not surprising—I don’t see how it could be.
Q: What do you feel were the biggest lessons learned from the pandemic, and how do you feel those takeaways will continue to impact and influence the delivery of services going forward?
Lydie: We have always needed to be innovative and creative in how we deliver services, but COVID brought it to an entirely new level. We learned how to be creative with our program space--the need to reduce capacity and to have quarantine space set up forced us to figure out ways to organize our programs more effectively.
We also found ways to streamline and improve our communication, within or service area, and as it pertained to the rest of the agency. We revved up our capability to do data collections, and made a lot of progress on learning how to get information out more quickly to partner organizations and to clients.
The pandemic allowed us to accelerate the move toward telehealth. Pre-COVID, it was something mostly in the conceptual stages, but we figured out how to serve clients by doing self-help groups over Zoom. Telehealth was hugely helpful at our Treatment Center: a practitioner there could be doing an intake with someone at the Center, then quickly jump onto an appointment with someone at our New Hope program, or even conduct the support groups that were normally in-person. It made it much quicker and safer to get people into treatment and to expedite access to services.
Q: What new initiatives or programs are on the horizon for Addiction Services?
Lydie: After a very difficult year, our biggest priority is the stabilization of our existing services. We’ve dealt with reduced capacity even as the need for services as increased. Bay Cove—along with other agencies across the state—are really focused on regaining the ability to serve as many people as we can.
Once that happens, though, we are looking to expand and strengthen the offerings through our Treatment Center. We’re looking to begin offering buprenorphine and naltrexone in addition to methadone, and we’ve recently received a State Opioid Response Grant from the Department of Public Health to partner with correctional facilities to connect with citizens returning from incarceration prior to their release. The goal is to give people in need of maintenance and recovery assistance a place to go right on Day One.
