Ontario has launched new opioid-tracking website to help healthcare workers and policy makers, including public health units and LHINs, better understand the problem and try to do something about it.
The tracker provides 13 years of information on opioid-related emergency department visits, hospitalizations and deaths in Ontario.
Dr. David Williams, Ontario's chief medical officer of health, says the tracker supports the development of targeted policies and interventions that will strengthen response on a provincial and local level.
"Talk seriously about how we slowly ratch this down and not suddenly dropping it because you can't just turn it off. You have to taper people carefully and with proper substitution therapy," says Williams.
The new tracker shows that 412 people died from opioid overdoses in Ontario during the first six months of 2016 compared with 371 during the same time period in 2015.
Part of a provincial strategy announced last year to prevent opioid addiction and overdose includes disorder and prescription management and 18 pain management clinics across Ontario but none is coming this way.
The Chatham area is the highest opioid user in the province.
The province also has a narcotic monitoring system to track doctors who are prescribing too many painkillers and address the situation.
Dr. Williams says opioid addiction and overdose doesn't have one solution and it'll take time to train healthcare professionals and doctors to change their prescribing and dispensing methods.
"Re-educate our physician community, new graduates, paramedics and staff to decrease the use and dependency on opioids, to limit that amount. That's a change over time," Williams says.
Dr. Williams says the onus is also on the individual and it's going to take time to educate the public.
"People on high dose to bring them down, taper them down to a more realistic and safer dose that leads to lesser overdoses. Try and get the public to say, if you're given a prescription, do I really need this?" says Williams.