New addiction treatment facility at Hoag in Newport Beach announced thanks to $25 million donation
An expansion of facilities for the treatment of substance abuse announced this week by officials at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach is partly thanks to a charitable donation of $25 million and comes against the backdrop of skyrocketing rates of overdose deaths in the U.S. over the past two decades.
The donation came from the Martin and Pickup families and will cover about half the cost to build the hospital’s planned Caremar Recovery Center. The new building will allow Hoag to increase its spots for inpatient addiction treatment from 21 to 28, and will raise its capacity for outpatient care to around 60 or 70 people, according to Michael Brant-Zawadzki, Hoag’s vice president of Clinical Research Administration and Kambria Hittelman, executive director of Hoag Addiction Treatment Centers.
The new building will give the hospital’s addiction treatment program room to develop specialized tracks of care geared toward veterans, the elderly, first-responders, women, men and other specific groups of people. It may also facilitate group sessions at night.
The upgrade helps confront the rising death toll of substance abuse in America. The rate of people killed by overdose in the U.S. quadrupled over the past 20 years, with 107,941 recorded in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Research suggests the COVID-19 Pandemic accelerated that trend.
Those figures do not fully account for cases in which an addiction exacerbated an underlying condition that led to someone’s death, Brant-Zawadzki said. The true cost of substance abuse may be much higher.
He also noted that alcohol continues to be the leading drug associated with addiction. But the prevalence of opioid abuse, in particular fentanyl, has risen dramatically in recent years. It’s the second most common drug that patients at Hoag are working to overcome, Hittelman said.
The reach of substance abuse across age groups has also broadened, Brant-Zawadzki and Hittelman said. It’s now far more common among older Americans than ever.
“Approximately 50% of the folks in our treatment programs for substance are 50 and over,” Brant-Zawadzki said. “So that’s a demographic change. People think of addiction as a young person’s problem and still think of it, because of the term behavioral therapy, as bad behavior. But in reality addiction is coupled to mental health disorders quite tightly. And people self-medicate, whether it’s anxiety in our youth [or] depression in our seniors.”
A specific date to break ground on the project has not yet been determined. Eventually, Brant-Zawadzki said he would like to see the new facility become a host for trials for new forms of care. He said Hoag may also be interested in developing a medically assisted treatment program. That involves a combination of counseling with the use of drugs like methadone, in the case of opioids, to replace more harmful substances like fentanyl or heroin.
Although addiction may have practically always been an issue in society, the condition is deadlier now than ever before, Brant-Zawadzki and Hittelman said. For them and many others in the field of substance abuse treatment, their mission to combat it is personal. But they also know from firsthand experience that recovery truly is possible.
“I grew up in this field younger than, unfortunately, I had to,” Hittelman said. “My dad is a recovering alcoholic. ... he’s just celebrated 33 years of his sobriety just this year. So i just grew up with being in that world, being in that environment and seeing change can really happen for the better and how impactful it could be.”
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