Public Health/Public Safety Strategies to Reduce Drug Overdose Data Collection

I encourage CDC to ensure that information collection activities related to public health/public safety overdose-prevention strategies incorporate perspectives from people with lived and living experience of OUD and substance use recovery. Such perspectives can provide valuable information regarding how overdose-prevention strategies are experienced by the populations they are intended to serve, including barriers to engagement, service preferences, and unintended consequences of public health and public safety strategies. They may also identify lessons learned that are difficult to capture through routine administrative data collection and may not be fully apparent to organizational stakeholders. Incorporating the perspectives of people with lived and living experience of OUD and substance use recovery can improve the utility, validity, and practical relevance of the information collected.