Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Drug checking is an emerging response to the escalating illicit drug overdose crisis in Canada which allows people to identify the contents of a substance and receive real-time drug information, made possible through innovations in portable spectroscopy instruments. Over the last year, the Vancouver Island Drug Checking Project has been providing free and confidential drug checking at Victoria BC harm reduction sites. Our team can determine a sample's main active ingredients, fillers or cutting agents, any unexpected adulterants, and the presence of fentanyl. The project is guided by Canada's Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) and our project team includes people who use drugs, healthcare providers, health system decision makers and researchers. Now that we are fully operational, these stakeholders have requested drug checking dissemination strategies that are effective, accessible and appropriate for multiple audiences. Specifically, patient partners identified the need to disseminate written, rather than verbal, drug checking results to service users while healthcare providers identified the dissemination of community-level (aggregate) drug checking reports as a priority. The proposed project will therefore create knowledge dissemination products for this drug-checking project responding to the illicit drug overdose emergency. Specifically, we will: (1) Create and implement user-informed written drug checking reports for service users using text and visualizations to communicate data in a format that is understandable, usable, and respectful, while conveying uncertainty and risks. (2) Develop and launch web-based community drug checking reports using text and visualizations to disseminate aggregate drug checking data to the general population, healthcare providers and policy makers. (3) Continue engaging with collaborators and service users to inform ongoing and potentially broader dissemination efforts.