In one year, Riverside Regional Medical Center saw an increase of more than 47 percent in emergency room visits related to opioid use.
The Newport News hospital had 26 cases in 2016, compared with 16 in 2015. There were 23 in 2014, hospital spokeswoman Wendy Hetman said in an email.
In Hampton, the Sentara CarePlex Hospital saw opioid-related emergency department visits increase from 209 to 520 in one year – from 2015 to 2016.
A national report shows the local hospital is not alone — opioid treatment in emergency rooms have surged 99 percent since 2005. There were 1.3 million opioid-related emergency room visits or hospital stays in 2014, the latest year for which complete figures were available.
With the country in the midst of an opioid epidemic, experts expect the numbers to continue to rise, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which released the report.
“Our data tell us what is going on. They tell us what the facts are. But they don’t give us the underlying reasons for what we’re seeing here,” report co-author Anne Elixhauser, a senior research scientist with the agency, told The Washington Post.
The 2014 numbers, the latest available for every state and the District of Columbia, reflect a 64 percent increase for inpatient care and the jump for emergency room treatment compared with figures from 2005, the Post reported.
The sharpest increase in hospitalization and emergency room treatment for opioids was among people ages 25 to 44. The data also show that women are now as likely as men to be admitted to a hospital for inpatient treatment for opioid-related problems.
At least 1,420 people died in Virginia last year from drug overdoses, the fourth year that drugs have outpaced motor vehicle accidents and gun-related incidents as the leading cause of unnatural death, the Virginia Department of Health reports.
On Tuesday, the state agency hosted more than 300 health officials, community agencies and law enforcement officers at an opioid summit in Hampton to discuss a drug crisis decades after the “War on Drugs” was declared.
The crowd listened to a series of speakers who talked about coordinating continuous care for drug addicts.
Fred Brason II of the North Carolina-based Project Lazarus, which worked with officials there to create an opioid overdose prevention program, talked about successes the state had with its opioid problems. And he encouraged local officials not to try to copy North Carolina’s program.
“You have to create a program that will work for your communities,” Brason said. “You know your communities and what they need. You have to own it to make it a success.”
Several local agency leaders expressed a need for an agency to coordinate care for people and not just leave them to their own devices to find counseling on their own after facing a crisis.
Brason told the crowd if a person is ready and wants treatment, the community has to have services in place to help him or her succeed.
In 2014, fatal overdoses overtook motor vehicle crashes as the most common cause of accidental death in Virginia. Last year, Gov. Terry McAuliffe and state health officials declared the opioid epidemic a public-health emergency in the state.
By this time last year, more than 300 people in Hampton Roads had overdosed on drugs, local police and health officials reported. Sixty-five of those overdoses — many of them pertaining to heroin and prescription painkillers — were fatal.
When the health department planned the opioid summit, organizers worried they wouldn’t have enough people who wanted to participate, said Dr. Heidi Kulburg, director of the Virginia Beach health department and the Hampton Roads Opioid Working Group.
They were encouraged to see so many people interested in helping, she said.
The Washington Post contributed to this story. Canty can be reached by phone at 757-247-4832.
