Dr. Hochstatter Receives R21 Award

FRI is pleased to announce that Dr. Karli R Hochstatter has received an R21 award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse through the HEAL Initiative, titled “Leveraging a time-limited opportunity to study the impact of an intervention for individuals bereaved by drug overdose.” Co-investigators include Drs. Jan Gryczynski and Karen Alexander. This study is in collaboration with New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), who routinely encounters the social networks of overdose decedents during death investigations and recently implemented an intervention, Social Worker Outreach and Resource Delivery (SWORD), to reduce health risks after loss to drug overdose. Despite abundant evidence demonstrating that people bereaved by overdose are at higher risk of poor health outcomes than people bereaved by other types of deaths, health interventions specifically designed for people who experience loss to overdose have not been scientifically studied. In this study, we will leverage the OCME’s random selection for SWORD by conducting surveys with 300 overdose bereaved individuals (150 SWORD, 150 Control) 6 months post-loss to examine the effect of SWORD on grief severity, substance use, and other measures of bereavement-related functioning (anxiety, depression, PTSD, coping). We will also characterize the needs of overdose-bereaved individuals and identify high-need subgroups and gaps in SWORD services using the survey data and through qualitative interviews with 30 overdose bereaved adults. Findings from this R21 study will be used to make enhancements to the SWORD intervention and design a future large-scale RCT of SWORD that ensures optimal intervention design and targets the most vulnerable people bereaved by overdose.