[S]OUTH BURLINGTON — The first lady of North Dakota is in Vermont this week to learn about the state’s response to the opioid crisis.
Kathryn Helgaas Burgum has taken on addiction prevention and treatment in her state since marrying North Dakota’s Republican Gov. Doug Burgum last year. She has spoken publicly about her own recovery from alcoholism, which includes 15 years of sobriety.
“I believe that one way the governor and I can make a difference in our state, and maybe in other states, is to talk about the chronic disease of addiction. It is not a moral failure or a character flaw, it’s a disease,” Helgaas Burgum said at a news conference Wednesday in South Burlington.
She has made similar trips to New Jersey, Massachusetts and Arizona to learn about how states are responding to addiction-related issues.
Helgaas Burgum said she’s particularly interested in Vermont’s hub-and-spoke drug treatment model. It relies on large “hub” clinics to provide medication-assisted treatment to high-need patients, and smaller “spoke” practices where people in recovery receive similar services typically in a primary care setting.
North Dakota and Vermont both have small, mostly rural populations, she said, making the model one that could translate well to her state.
Helgaas Burgum was at the Lund Family Center on Wednesday to learn about how Vermont deals with the increasing number of opiate-dependent pregnant women and new mothers in the state.
Gov. Phil Scott took the opportunity to highlight Lund’s work with the University of Vermont Medical Center, state agencies and other social service nonprofits to help mitigate the fallout from addiction for mothers and children. Lund is Vermont’s only residential addiction treatment program that allows mothers with substance abuse disorders to stay with their children.
“We are not just treating the mother or the parents. We are also providing prevention, intervention and support for the children, which is key to our approach and sets our programs apart,” said Barbara Rachelson, Lund’s executive director and a Democratic state representative.
The challenges are still immense, officials said. Commissioner Ken Schatz, of the Department for Children and Families, said that over the last three years, the number of children in state custody has grown 30 percent. Fifty percent of children younger than 5 are in state custody because of a parent’s addiction, Schatz said.
Dr. Anne Johnston, a neonatologist at the UVM Medical Center, leads the CHARM Program, which stands for “Children and Recovering Mothers.” Johnston said figures from 2015 showed that 40 percent of opiate-dependent women who gave birth at the medical center were in treatment prior to conceiving.
Johnston said she has no reason to believe that number has changed, and she would ultimately like to see it increased.
However, there are still major barriers to drawing more women into treatment once they become pregnant. Primary among those is the fear that the state will take their child if they seek treatment, Johnston said.
“Most of them do want help, but there is a huge amount of fear, and the fear is well-founded,” she said.
Schatz acknowledged that inherent tension, noting his department’s responsibility to ensure children’s welfare. That makes the state’s partnership with social service providers that work with addicted mothers even more critical, he said.
Ensuring access to drug treatment is a worthwhile goal on its own, he said, but when the person seeking help is a parent “we also need to engage … issues related to safe care of the child and parenting skills along with addressing recovery issues.”
“We’re actually working with Lund to do an even more comprehensive family-based approach in terms of early intervention,” Schatz said.
