Report highlights challenges to medication-assisted treatment access in rural Maine

A new report from the University of Vermont highlights how the challenges faced by providers and their patients undercut access to medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorders in Maine’s rural areas.

UVM’s Center on Rural Addiction worked with University of Southern Maine’s Cutler Institute to survey more than 300 practitioners and community stakeholders from all 16 Maine counties between April and June of last year. All respondents worked in at least one federally designated rural area.

The universities’ assessment, published in May of this year, shows how, in particular, staffing and time constraints, barriers to access for patients — transportation, paid time off, childcare, for example — and increasingly lethal drugs taken in combination with other substances, are major concerns for this group when it comes to providing care to rural patients.