HMA’s trusted experts have a wealth of harm reduction experience, from training volunteers for community outreach to managing state procurement processes for harm reduction tools, to policy analyses at all levels of government.
Our consultants have worked with stakeholders of all walks of life including people with lived and living experience of drug use, sex work, and homelessness. In fact, we believe in talking to them first to understand local needs and feasible solutions.
What is harm reduction?
The term “harm reduction” is often used to describe:
provision of risk reduction tools, like condoms, naloxone, and sterile syringes;
approach of meeting people where they are and supporting them at their own pace, without judgement, to pursue self-determined goals; and,
philosophy that promotes equitable access to resources for people who use drugs and struggle to meet basic needs due to the impact of social structures.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) defines harm reduction as a practical and transformative approach that incorporates community-driven public health strategies — including prevention, risk reduction, and health promotion — to empower people who use drugs and their families with the choice to live healthier, self-directed, and purpose-filled lives.
The President’s National Drug Control Strategy is the first-ever to champion harm reduction to meet people where they are and engage them in care and services.
People are dying from drug overdose at an alarming rate in the U.S. For the fourth year in a row, we have lost over 100,000 people (enough to fill the University of Michigan stadium). Many of these deaths are preventable. Harm reduction interventions proven to stop overdose deaths include making the overdose reversal drug naloxone available to all at risk of overdose, reducing barriers to medications that treat opioid use disorder, and providing supervised drug consumption services for rapid overdose response. Moreover, successful harm reduction programs rely on reducing the stigma of drug use and people who have an addiction.
How HMA can help
Harm reduction is more than handing out naloxone or syringes; it’s a nonjudgemental approach that affirms participant autonomy and engages people in care over the long term.
Here are just a few services HMA can offer to help clients establish, expand, or improve services for people who use drugs, respond to overdose and infectious disease syndemics (combinations of two or more diseases or health conditions that interact within a population, often due to social and structural factors and inequities), and prevent the next drug crisis.
HMA provides training and technical assistance to a range of clients – from community-based organizations conducting outreach, to medical providers wishing to better serve their patients, to large hospital systems wishing to incorporate drug user health into their systems. HMA can:
- Plan, coordinate and evaluate learning collaboratives.
- Provide 1-1 coaching to staff and teams.
- Produce and implement industry-specific toolkits aimed at reducing overdose, like for construction businesses, restaurants or harm reduction vending machines.
- Train different audiences and teams, including youth treatment providers, primary care settings, and carceral settings, on harm reduction.
- Support startup of new naloxone distribution and/or syringe services programs and develop capacity building plans for program growth.
- Improve access to medications for opioid use disorder.
A quality improvement (QI) strategy is vital for healthcare organizations to maximize patient outcomes and satisfaction, achieve efficiency, and ensure compliance with regulations. HMA can:
- Apply established QI models to increase reach of harm reduction and drug user health services within community-based programs, government agencies, and provider programs and systems.
- Plan, assess, and evaluate QI efforts.
- Increase team buy-in for harm reduction as a QI initiative.
- Provide QI tools such as rapid assessment participant surveys, risk screeners, provider checklists, and guides.
Many funding opportunities require (or can benefit from) a detailed assessment of the community’s need for the services being funded. Our experts can help gather both quantitative data and qualitative stakeholder input to ensure that the client’s proposed plan targets the populations, communities, and gaps in service for which resources will be most impactful. HMA can:
- Conduct interviews and focus groups with people who use drugs and the service providers they interact with to identify local needs and solutions.
- Assess and predict drug user health syndemics using infectious disease and overdose metrics.
- Demonstrate trends among diverse populations, including youth and racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender minorities .
- Guide efforts to integrate harm reduction into a broader continuum of care, including prevention and treatment interventions.
The legal landscape related to drug use varies across communities and does not always facilitate a public health approach. HMA can:
- Identify policy options and facilitate choice of the most effective and feasible one for the client’s local context.
- Evaluate new or existing policies that impact people who use drugs such as Good Samaritan laws, opioid treatment program regulations, and criminal charges.
- Apply statistical methods to policy evaluation such as time-interrupted analysis.
Multi-sector collaboration is essential to develop sustainable, impactful solutions to reduce physical and structural harms related to drug use. HMA can:
- Facilitate workgroup-driven policy recommendations for expansion of behavioral health treatment and overdose prevention approaches such as safer supply.
- Design social media campaigns that center the voices of people most impacted by overdose.
- Strategize, create, and plan marketing and communications campaigns for harm reduction, stigma reduction, or program promotion.
- Facilitate community mobilization efforts and multi-sector alliances to generate and implement strategies for policy change.
- Build harm reduction resource libraries for stakeholder use.
HMA consultants work with clients to review program efficacy and cost efficiency based on process, outcomes, costs and more, considering quantitative and qualitative data sources and using data-driven tools to assess and measure impact. HMA can:
- Conduct environmental scans of jurisdictional resources to highlight opportunities for and threats to harm reduction programs .
- Build maps that overlay various metrics of drug user health, including infectious disease burden, overdose, and socio-economic indicators.
- Map overdose fatality and naloxone saturation to prioritize distribution efforts in areas of high-need.
- Conduct regression analysis to identify risk profiles and predictive values to evaluate impact.
Project Spotlight
Contact our experts:
Anika Alvanzo
Principal
Jennifer Bridgeforth
Associate Principal
Tricia Christensen
Senior Consultant
Liddy Garcia-Bunuel
Principal
Rachel LaFlame
Research Associate
Nicole Lovitch
Research Associate
Trish Marsik
Principal
Charles Robbins
Principal
Erin Russell
Principal
Kate Washburn
Associate Principal
