Best practice portal main page
Emergency department-based opioid substitution treatment (OST) initiation
Summary of the evidence
Buprenorphine initiation in emergency departments was found in a narrative systematic review (Kaczorowski et al., 2020) to have:
- positive short-term effects on treatment outcomes (i.e. retention and use)
The review concluded that while EDs seems to be an appropriate setting for initiating opioid agonist treatment, in order to be sustained, it likely needs to be coupled with community-based follow-up and support to ensure longer-term retention.
