More Tarrant residents are dying of overdoses. How responders are trying to slow the tide

Amy Yang sits down at her computer and begins to scrolls through a list, searching for signs that could be missed by the untrained eye.

An overdose of opioids. An unknown overdose. Another unknown overdose. An alcohol overdose. An overdose of sleeping pills.

Yang is reading through every overdose that MedStar, Fort Worth’s emergency medical provider, has responded to in the last two days.

Usually, when someone overdoses, a loved one, neighbor, or bystander will call 911 to seek help. Some of those who overdose will die; some will be hospitalized; others will go straight to a treatment facility.

But some will survive and then return home, with a recurring substance use disorder and few options for help. These are the people Yang is looking for as she scrolls.

Eventually, she narrows her list down to four people: Two people wouldn’t tell emergency responders what they took before their overdose. One person overdosed on an over-the-counter drug. Another took a deadly cocktail of multiple drugs, including opioids. These are the people Yang will talk to today.

Yang, a mobile health paramedic, is part of a new initiative that attempts to respond to every overdose in MedStar’s service area, which includes Fort Worth and 14 neighboring cities. It’s a new partnership between MedStar and the nonprofit Recovery Resource Council, and an attempt to connect more quickly with nonfatal overdose survivors in MedStar’s service area.

The team began to reach out to overdose survivors in December, as Tarrant County and the rest of the nation saw record high numbers of overdose deaths from alcohol and drugs. Deaths from alcohol and drugs have been rising steadily for years, before jumping in 2020, during the first year of the pandemic. 2020 was the first year that the number of people who died from drug use topped 100,000 in the U.S.

The program aims to quickly link overdose survivors with help. Today, that help will come in the form of Sean Southern, a peer support specialist with Recovery Resource Council. Yang, 40, prints out a copy of the four cases she’s identified for the day and hands them to Southern. Southern takes them to the conference room and sits down to start the day’s work. He reads each report, highlighting relevant details in yellow ink. He keeps an eye open for people who overdosed on opioids.

Years ago, that was him. Southern is in recovery from opioid use disorder, which developed after he started taking painkillers after a job-related injury.

Today, Southern and Yang will reach out to four overdose survivors. They’ll offer them a medical screening and a chance to talk about what happened. Some of them won’t want to talk. Some will take a free dose of naloxone, the drug that can reverse opioid overdoses. Some won’t be interested be interested in recovery — yet.

“This partnership says, ‘Hey, we’re here. Here’s the information. Here’s the resources when you’re ready. And here’s the harm reduction approach that we can take in the meantime,’” said Brandon Pate, MedStar’s assistant operations manager.

Alcohol, drug deaths increasing in Tarrant County

For the last 20 years, the number of people dying from alcohol and drugs has been rising steadily. In 2013, about 6 people in Tarrant County died from alcohol-related causes for every 100,000 residents. A decade later, the rate jumped to 10.5 people per 100,000, according to federal death certificate data.

Experts say the trend was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but that drug and alcohol deaths were already increasing rapidly even before the unprecedented disruptions of 2020.

The problem is manifesting in myriad ways: More people in Tarrant County are dying from alcohol-related liver cirrhosis, according to death certificate data. More people are overdosing on drugs, alcohol, or some combination. And more people are showing up in hospital emergency rooms with alcohol use disorder.

Sandy Potter, the vice president of behavioral health services at Texas Health Resources, starting noticing the problem last year she was looking at emergency room data: More people were dying from alcohol use disorder.

“When I started digging into the data, I noticed that our overall number of people who were dying as a result of alcohol related complications was going up,” Potter said.

In 2019, seven emergency room patients at Texas Health Resources ultimately died from alcohol use disorder, according to Potter’s data. But in the first five months of 2022, 17 of the health system’s ER patients have already died from the disorder, Potter said.

“That just validated to me that, wow, people are really much sicker,” Potter said.

Meeting people where they are

Back at MedStar’s headquarters, Yang and Southern prepare to talk to people who might have shown up in Potter’s emergency rooms.

They’ll drive throughout the Fort Worth area, knocking on the doors of overdose survivors.

They meet people in driveways, on front porches, at dining room tables, on the floor of living rooms.

Yang usually initiates the conversation, explaining that she’s from MedStar. If the patient gives them the OK to come inside, she’ll offer them a brief medical screening, to make sure there are no physiological signals that someone is still in distress.

Then, she’ll let her partner at Recovery Resource Council take over.

On days when she’s working with Southern, he’ll usually talk about his long and ongoing experience with opioid use disorder. Southern has a background as a firefighter and emergency responder, before a work injury

Other days, Yang is working with Michael Watkins, a longtime professional chef who replaced regular methamphetamine use with drinking.

“Somehow I quit cold turkey,” Watkins said about using meth. “And I said, ‘Good job, Mike. Let’s go have a beer.’”

For 13 years, Watkins struggled with alcohol use disorder. At the time, he was working as a sous chef in Arizona.

“I couldn’t imagine a life not drinking at that point,” Watkins said.

Watkins has been sober and in recovery for almost a decade.