Arts:Books
Chapter 49: Dr. Andrea Sereda’s oddly original offerings on opioid overdosing
2020-03-09
Dr. Andrea Sereda graduated from Schulich Medicine in 2007. She provides care through the London Intercommunity Health Centre in London, Ontario.
Dr. Sereda is a family physician who practices street outreach medicine, caring for people living in homelessness, women working in the survival sex trade and people who inject drugs.
Dr. Sereda is an avid harm reductionist who has pioneered Canada’s first oral take-home Safe Supply program, which provides prescription opioids to people at risk of death from the fentanyl contaminated street drug supply. Safe Supply challenges the paradigms of how the healthcare system interacts with people who use drugs and is saving lives by dismantling the harms of drug prohibition.
Dr. Sereda also provides primary care for “Street Level Women at Risk” (SLWAR), a Housing First model of care that strives to rapidly house women while concurrently addressing a woman’s physical health, mental health and substance use problems. SLWAR is a program unique within Canada, bringing together a team of women supporting women. SLWAR is seeing profound successes in their work of housing and caring for chronically homeless women.
In 2018, Dr. Andrea Sereda was recognized as one of Canada’s top 40 under 40
Chapter Description:
Today we sit down with Dr. Andrea Sereda at the Sherbourne Health Centre on the east side of downtown Toronto, an area of the city sometimes known for its challenges with drug abuse.
Who is Dr. Andrea Sereda?
Dr. Andrea Sereda is a family physician who practices street outreach medicine. She provides care through the London InterCommunity Health Centre in London, Ontario and works with the emergency safer supply substitution program to prescribes hydromorphone, an opioid used by injection drug users to reduce the risk of contaminated street drugs.
Wait! What?
Yes, on the face of it, Dr. Andrea Sereda ‘gives drugs to drug users but there is a lot more to the story. We are going right to the front lines of the opioid epidemic which, even before the end of this conversation, will take 10 lives in North America alone. (To illustrate the issue more deeply, 8,048 Americans died of opioid related drug overdoses in 1999. What about now? Well, the number was 47,600 in 2017, which is the most recently available data.)
It will take ingenuity, creativity, and passion to address this issue. As you’ll hear, Dr. Andrea Sereda offers all three in spades. Her views are often provocative, sometimes controversial, and she will argue that drugs should be decriminalized and why we should indeed give drugs to drug users. What about the challenges to these ideas? The critics? The controversies? We get into that, too. And we are fortunate enough to use Andrea’s three most formative books as a launchpad into this conversation.
I am so grateful to Dr. Andrea Sereda for sharing so much of her life, her journey, and her practice with all of us.
I find her and her work incredibly challenging, intriguing, and inspiring.
I hope you do, too.
Let’s go!
What You'll Learn:
Why should drugs be given to drug users? Should drugs be decriminalized? Why or why not? What is actually more harmful -- the drugs themselves or the quality of drugs? How can we reduce stigma on people in our communities living with mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness Can drugs be considered a ‘basic need’?
You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://www.3books.com/chapters/49
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