Yes, very often we talk about the stats, but there are real people behind these numbers. I want to talk briefly about Jacob Wilson.
In August 2018, Jacob was 21. He was hit by a pickup truck as a pedestrian and suffered a catastrophic brain injury. In the three years that followed, he struggled with psychosis and turned to drug use. In November 2021, Jacob died of a fentanyl overdose after having been turned away twice from the hospital in the 48 hours before he died.
To quote his mother, Shirley, the same health care system “that rescued him and stabilized him” and kept him alive when he was run over “turned him away at the emergency department when they could have saved his life.” If we're going to save people, we need a health care system that's going to treat them well and ensure they can live well afterward.
We need integrated care models, as I mentioned, that address both the substance use and the brain injury. They need to be built to be accessible for people with brain injury. They need to take into account the information processing challenges, the memory impairments. For example, 12-step programs are effective, but if someone can't remember two steps in a sequence, then that is a huge barrier.
We need more community support. We don't want to wait until people are in crisis. We very much do crisis medicine, crisis reaction, but we need to not wait until people get there. We need to provide the supports and services that they need so that they don't get to that point and they don't have to turn to drug use to feel better.
Then we also need to have more data and research on this specific topic for those who do survive. We focus on the deaths, but those who do survive are living most likely with hypoxic brain injuries and are not always getting the care they need. We need to create a health care system that provides that care. A lot of it can be done in the community, which is cost-effective. It keeps people in the communities where they have their networks, their social systems and the resources that are going to help them thrive.