Comment on Student barbers add reversing opioid overdoses to their list of skills

Student barbers add reversing opioid overdoses to their list of skills

A social worker and nurse practitioner demonstrated how to administer Narcan nasal spray — a potentially life-saving treatment during an opioid overdose — to a classroom of more than a dozen barber college students on the city’s South Side on Tuesday. It was part of an initiative by Rush University Medical Center to help combat the opioid crisis in typically underserved communities. While the students aren’t training to be health care workers or medical providers, the next generation of barbers and hair stylists are uniquely poised to disseminate information about substance use disorders to their clients as well as administer Narcan to reverse an opioid overdose in the event of an emergency, said Keisha House, a nurse practitioner and assistant director of Rush’s Substance Use Disorder Center of Excellence. “You all are our eyes and ears, in the barbershop,” House told the audience at Larry’s Barber College in the Washington Park neighborhood, during a presentation on substance use disorders just before the Narcan demonstration. An opioid overdose in real life looks very different from what’s often portrayed on television and in movies, she explained to the students.

 

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