Public transport access to drug treatment before and during COVID-19: Implications for the opioid epidemic.

ABSTRACT: Public transport disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic had wide-ranging impacts on the ability of individuals to access health care. Individuals with opioid use disorder represent an especially vulnerable population due to the necessity of frequent, supervised doses of opioid agonists. Focused on Toronto, a major Canadian city suffering from the opioid epidemic, this analysis uses novel realistic routing methodologies to quantify how travel times to individuals\220 nearest clinics changed due to public transport disruptions from 2019 to 2020. Individuals seeking opioid agonist treatment face very constrained windows of access due to the need to manage work and other essential activities. We find that thousands of households in the most materially and socially deprived neighbourhoods

SUBMITTER: Yucel SG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10130333 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature