Bill Hazel
The Virginia Higher Education Opioids Consortium (VHEOC) is exactly the kind of partnership Bill Hazel believes can make a difference in Virginia communities fighting the challenges of the opioid epidemic.
With George Mason University on board with the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University and Virginia State University, the multidimensional research and treatment project has some serious “intellectual horsepower,” he said.
“These people who are studying projects know the latest ideas,” said Hazel, a senior advisor for innovation and community engagement in Mason’s Institute for Biohealth Innovation, and a principal proponent of the multi-university approach. “They know the best practices. They have the ability to help us understand the efficacy and impact of our programs. They have the ideas to design something that encourages collaboration among the universities and public-sector agencies.”
The VHEOC, with a two-year, $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, coordinates with the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Development Services to provide resources to local community service boards. Those boards are responsible for delivering behavioral health services to communities throughout the state.
With VHEOC support, community service boards can get help determining best practices to prevent and treat opioid addiction. The consortium will also help with data collection and analysis, and develop proposals for action in response to requests from the community service boards.
“What we need to do is get the word out to the community service boards that we are here and let them know that if they need academic talent, whether it’s in economics or program evaluation or psychology or criminal justice, or what, we can develop projects together, and there is funding for that,” Hazel said.
Though the coalition is led by David L. Driscoll, assistant dean of research at the University of Virginia, and director of the Office of Research at UVA’s School of Medicine, Hazel was instrumental in understanding the opportunity for a consortium to contract with the state.
The former secretary of health and human resources for Virginia was also one of the organizers—with Provost S. David Wu coordinating and Germaine Louis, dean of the College of Health and Human Services—of a day-long opioids symposium at Mason in April 2018 that brought together stakeholders from around the state and federal government and put Mason at the forefront of tackling Northern Virginia’s opioid epidemic.
Deaths from prescription opioid overdoses have more than doubled in the past two decades in Virginia, according to the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, rising from 1.7 per 100,000 Virginians in 1999 to 4.7 in 2017. More than 1,240 people statewide died of overdoses involving opioids in 2017.
“We want to make the point that Mason has a great deal of faculty that are involved in opioid research,” Hazel said. “Whether it’s in social work, whether it’s the criminal justice folks, there’s a lot of work being done and a lot of expertise that is available through these grants to support our community service boards and projects.”
Mason faculty interested in exploring projects through the VHEOC should contact Hazel at 703-993-2772 or whazel@gmu.edu.