Collaborating With Jails to Provide Community-Based Medication for Opioid Use Disorder: Qualitative Perspectives from MOUD Treatment Providers.

Objectives: As carceral settings increasingly offer medications for opioid use disorders (MOUD), community-based providers will need to navigate relationships with correctional agencies to ensure continuity of MOUD upon release. Although collaboration has been identified as critical between agencies, limited research is available that details how providers can work with jails. We describe the perspectives of MOUD providers about their experiences collaborating with jails that had recently begun to offer MOUD.

Methods: We conducted hour-long interviews with 36 MOUD providers from 18 community-based agencies. Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, and Sustainment (EPIS) concepts informed data collection and analysis.

Results: MOUD providers described agency-specific (inner context) factors that facilitated collaboration, including staffing (employing staff with knowledge of co-occurring conditions) and agency culture (adaptability to change, recognition of gaps in services, being judgment-free). Providers also reported external factors as facilitators, such as broad community support of MOUD services and provision of training about MOUD to jail staff. Holding regular meetings, with a dedicated contact person, helped to overcome communication problems. However, the fragmentation of in-jail treatment services, exacerbated by jails' contracting with different healthcare providers, made it difficult to coordinate re-entry and establish agency relationships. Actively and intentionally building interagency partnerships and collaborating across interagency cultural and structural differences were bridging factors that developed and sustained collaborations.

Conclusions: Our findings offer promising suggestions for establishing collaborations with carceral partners, including assessing internal agency conditions, seeking external community supports, committing to actively engaging and sustaining collaborations, and using interagency differences to develop mutually beneficial relationships.