Church-Tailored Opioid Overdose Education and Naloxone Distribution to Target Overdose and Stigma Among African-American Communities

Church-based interventions are culturally acceptable, reduce access barriers, and can be brought to scale in under-resourced communities. For Overdose Education and Naloxone Distribution (OEND) to be efficacious in Black churches, tailoring may be needed. For this audience, standard OEND curricula may need to be adapted to their level of knowledge of substance use disorders (SUDs), and limited general mental health literacy, and specifically address stigma related to SUDs and medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD). Finally, a tailored implementation strategy may need to address contextual variations (e.g., denomination and membership size) across churches. The proposed pilot study aims to identify the socio-cultural modifications that will be needed to adapt our previously developed training (i.e., COEST) to target Black communities of faith. In a pilot randomized controlled trial (RTC) of adapted COEST in a stepped-wedge design.