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Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith announces $5 million grant to combat opioid abuse
VIDEO: https://www.wjtv.com/news/senator-cindy-hyde-smith-announced-5-million-grant-for-community-health-centers-to-combat-opioid-ad/1460495555
By Jesse Finver
HATTIESBURG, MS (WJTV) - Mississippi is getting millions of dollars to fight opioid addiction.
Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith says a $5-million dollar grant will be split among 18 different clinics throughout the state.
Clearly, the state of Mississippi is not messing around when it comes to opioid abuse.
On Wednesday, the Southeast Mississippi Rural Health Initiative in Hattiesburg found out it is one of 18 health clinics in the state to receive federal funding to combat opioid addiction.
"It's an expansion of a current program that we have,” explained Will Harvey, SMRHI’s outreach marketing coordinator. “Behavior Health is one of the service lines we offer to our patients, and this grant is going to be so that we can integrate the behavior health and substance abuse treatment into primary care within our facilities."
Why is this so significant?
Harvey says this funding will expand the level of care they are able to provide each patient.
"One of the huge things about behavior health and substance abuse, is there's a lot of stigma that is attached to that,” said Harvey. “With that stigma come people not wanting to access care. But if they can come to a primary care provider or a regular doctors office, and get their other medical needs taken care of, and get this in the same place, they're more apt to take advantage of it.”
But Harvey says the biggest impact this grant will have is that now they'll be able to add more staff to their already established opioid addiction program.
"Bringing additional staff on board is one of the main things,” said Harvey. “With the behavior health piece, there's a lot of moving pieces to it, you know? There's someone that needs to be able to make sure that this program is accomplishing what it needs to accomplish. We have the primary care side, we have the dental side, and we also have other service lines that we offer."
In total the Southeast Mississippi Rural Health Initiative will receive $282,600 from this grant.