PEORIA — Warm handoff programs "certainly cover a big gap in care," said Dr. Kirk Moberg, executive medical director of the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery in Peoria, a UnityPoint Health affiliate.

Such programs, where hospitals start giving medicine to those misusing opioids and connect them immediately with ongoing drug treatment programs, are just part of addressing the opioid epidemic, though, Moberg said. The good news is that the epidemic is being better dealt with these days, he said.

"The major impact is that our society is taking this addiction problem a lot more seriously than in the past. ... Everybody is taking a piece of the problem and owning it."

In Peoria County, for example, "there's a concerted effort in the community," he said, to reduce opioid use through harm reduction programs. The JOLT Foundation's programs include giving sterile needles to individuals who inject drugs, distributing naloxone, offering fentanyl test strips and referring to treatment.

A main reason for the 20% decline in overdose deaths between 2017 and 2018 in Peoria County is "the result of harm reduction," coroner Jamie Harwood said.

An 18-month-old program in Rockford is being cited as one reason the number of opioid-related calls to Rockford Fire Department for paramedics dropped 43 percent — to 94 calls from 165 — during the first three months this year compared with the same quarter in 2018, said Robert Vertiz, division training chief.

In that program, paramedics knock on the doors of the residences of those they'd transported to emergency rooms for overdoses a day or two before and talk with the person who overdosed and family and friends about treatment. And they leave naloxone. Other groups, including Hope Over Addiction in Rockford and the Winnebago County Health Department, also have been offering naloxone for years to opioid abusers and their friends and families.

Other reasons for the decline, Vertiz said, could be that more chronic users have died from overdoses, laws for prescribing opioids have been made more restrictive, and there's greater access to treatment.

Rockford Fire Department in the next few months also plans to start a program where those struggling with an opioid addiction can go into any fire station to request treatment and transportation to a treatment facility will be offered.

"We are cautiously optimistic with the 43% reduction we have seen in suspected opioid-related incidents this year," Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara said. He also said he is encouraged by the warm handoff process.

"We have seen that the way we historically have left individuals to navigate a difficult process at a difficult time in their lives has not worked," McNamara said. "I believe the warm handoff coupled with the personal assistance ... will have a dramatic impact on this devastating epidemic."

Even so, there's still "a lot of work to do to turn this around," said Dr. Niranjan S. Karnik, psychiatry professor at Rush Medical College, Chicago.

It's important to educate adolescents and young adults on ways to prevent drug misuse, he said. "For adults who have difficulty with addiction, their roots started when they were younger," he said. "Pain is complicated. It will be a process helping people shift."