Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the provision of take-home doses of opioid agonist therapy in Ontario, Canada: A population-based time-series analysis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In March 2020, the Ontario government declared a state of emergency due to the growing risk of COVID-19. In response, new guidance for the management of opioid agonist therapy (OAT) was released, which included the expansion of eligibility for take-home doses. We investigated the impact of these changes on trends in the distribution of take-home doses of OAT.

Methods

We conducted a population-based time series analysis among residents of Ontario, Canada who were dispensed OAT between June 25, 2019 and November 30, 2020. For each week of the study period, we calculated the percentage of people dispensed (a) methadone and (b) buprenorphine/naloxone by the number of take-home doses received. We used interventional autoregressive integrated moving average models to es

SUBMITTER: Kitchen SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8885322 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature