A New Player on the Opioid Front: Houston Area Leaders Opioid Surveillance (HALOS)

A New Player on the Opioid Front: Houston Area Leaders Opioid Surveillance (HALOS) 1Houston Recovery Center is pulling internal and external resources together to help fight the opioid epidemic as a team. The new initiative dubbed HALOS (Houston Area Leaders Opioid Surveillance) will help identify patterns and trends of opioid use through community connections and data collection. Two groups kick off in August.

HALOS-HRC is agency specific joining Houston Recovery Center staff working on the opioid crisis in our community. Program interventions include the sobering center, Partners in Recovery, FRONTLINES, HEROS, TTOR, PIT, and Harris County criminal justice settings.

“We want to come together to see what all the staff and clients are experiencing, as well as the barriers they are encountering,” says Gina Bryan, director of Intake and Opioid Services. “We also want to understand what other programs do to help facilitate smoother encounters with clients in the community.”

A second group, HALOS-Houston, invites our referral partners  along with stakeholders across Greater Houston  such as Houston Health Department, treatment centers, hospitals, healthcare agencies, law enforcement, and courts and community coalitions. This synergy enables everyone to combine resources and methods that work, so organizations aren’t spending extra time re-inventing the wheel.

At the most basic level, HALOS wants to disseminate overdose prevention information and NARCAN in order to save lives in the community. The opioid epidemic is more hidden in Houston’s private residential sector, unlike other U.S. cities where it has a more public profile.