Our rapid reviews addresses the following question: What current organizational supports are cited in the published and grey literature for workers responding to overdoses in the community? We defined workers as any individuals responding to substance use-related harms. This includes individuals who are paid by an organization and those who are unpaid for overdose response in the community. Our search primarily focussed on community health workers, workers with living and lived experience of substance use, and health or social service providers. As part of this review, we aimed to explore a broad range of potential organizational supports to protect and promote the safety, health, and well-being of workers. This includes training, compensation and benefits, policies, amongst others. Individual-level personal habits and selfcare activities were not in scope. While many sectors are impacted by the ongoing drug poisoning crisis, the scope of our review is the substance use, mental health, harm reduction, sexually transmitted and blood-borne infection, housing, and healthcare sector.

Key findings:

• Repeated exposure to increasing overdoses and overdose-related loss can be stressful, demanding, and traumatic for workers responding to overdose during the drug poisoning crisis.
• There is little research and evaluation on available approaches used to support workers with overdose and substance-use related grief, stress, trauma, and burnout in the current context. Facilitating access to support services, enabling peer-based supports, opportunities for training and skill development, and strengthening supportive management that better serves employees are common approaches that currently exist or are recommended.
• Our analysis identified key areas for future research and practices for supports that address the emotional toll of workers responding to overdose. These include addressing inequities, workers’ perspectives, and factors at multiple levels that shape workers’ well-being. Assessing these supports to make sure they are effective for different workers, settings, and contexts, and do not produce further stress or other unintended harms is critical.

See also, Recorded webinar, October 2021 - Learning exchange: Supports for workers responding to overdoses in Ontario [1.30 hours]