An innovative acute care based intervention to address the opioid crisis in a Canadian setting

The ongoing opioid crisis has placed a considerable burden on acute care settings in North America. The present commentary outlines that the rising volume of patients with opioid-related harms in acute care settings represents an often-missed opportunity to address important health and social needs as well as facilitate access to addiction treatment services. It then describes an innovative, inter-disciplinary model-of-care developed to address the needs of patients with a substance use disorder who present to the emergency department for medical care at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, Canada.