By Lupe Jacobson
BU News Service
CAMBRIDGE – Local startup General Emergency Medical Supplies (GEMS) has invented a product which could bring Naloxone to the streets of Cambridge so bystanders can respond in critical situations. This year may be the year city officials approve the innovative overdose-prevention program.
The concept is to place “lockboxes” at strategic locations around the city. Narcan, the popular brand name of the nasal overdose-reversal spray Naloxone, would be kept in boxes where dispatchers could guide those finding overdose patients on how to administer the spray using a code provided by the dispatcher to save time before responders are able to get to the scene.
“The next logical step would be the public. Could we give them the ability to provide a life-saving antidote?” asked Scott Goldberg, director of Emergency Medical Services at Brigham & Women’s Hospital.
Bringing emergency supplies to the public is a relatively new idea and a lockbox stocked with Narcan would be the first of its kind. Goldberg noted the first test would be to see if bystanders could use the Narcan spray, if they were willing to use it and finally whether it would make a difference.
A small pilot program in Central Square this summer tested the willingness of passersby to administer Narcan. Garnering more participants than expected, 53 of the 54 people who participated were able to successfully administer the spray to a dummy.
Alexander Walley, director of the Boston University Addiction Medicine Fellowship Program, said the spray, “requires very minimal training, and most people can intuitively use it.”
In Cambridge alone, emergency medical service providers reported opioid-related calls almost doubled from 2015 to 2016 when they responded 457 times. Of those 457, 26 people died of from an overdose, up from 13 in 2015.
A small pilot program in Central Square this summer tested the willingness of passersby to administer Narcan. Garnering more participants than expected, 53 of the 54 people who participated were able to successfully administer the spray to a dummy.
Still in the initial stages, Walley can’t say whether or not people would use the lockboxes provided, but was optimistic.
“There’s a lot of people in public carrying Naloxone, and there always could be more,” Walley said. “There are certainly people who are rescuing people in public.”
Both Goldberg and Walley consider Naloxone to be imperative in solving the opioid crisis.
Emergency medical services began carrying Naloxone in the early 70s. Jeremy Warnick, communications director at the Cambridge Police Department says officers have been successfully administering Narcan and have been working with GEMS in their planning process.
Studies continue to show the more Naloxone available, the less overdoses occur. Data collected in the upcoming year will be very telling for the future of GEMS and the implementation of lock boxes.
Prior to the pilot study, Andrew Schwartz, GEMS CEO and a lockbox innovator, said they had, “hot-spotted data of 911 calls.” The data allowed them to geo-locate specific blocks where the most overdose calls had been made in order to place the lockboxes most efficiently.
Schwartz said the boxes will also include tourniquets and gauze for hemorrhage control and epipens for allergic reactions. Ultimately, Schwartz said, “the decision will come down to the city of Cambridge.”
Schwartz said there are five lockboxes nearly ready to be deployed and their goal is to have finalized the engineering by the end of this year. Then, the GEMS. team will reach out to the city of Cambridge, the Police Department and local addiction services in order to come up with a timeline for deployment.
