Health experts and counselors from around the state came together last week for a substance use symposium hosted by the University of Louisville Hospital.

Attendees learned about the most recent research on substance use, as well as how to reduce the stigma surrounding the disorders.

We're bringing both clinicians in the hospitals and clinicians outside of the hospital together so they can have conversations, dialog, and try to work on reducing stigma for this patient population.

Not only do we have Reclaim Recovery, Seven Counties, Healing Place, we also have the Kentucky Board of Nursing here.

We have representatives from all over you of a health including PS Marion, Elizabeth and such.

So we just have really a lot of different people from the community came together to be able to talk and network.

And just meeting other people that do this work, the same work that we do.

Those relationships are so valuable where as possibly there's someone I cannot help, there's another community partner met that can.

So between the collaborative group of us, we're able to help more people.

So that's the main benefit to being here today.

But also hearing from the front line with you of ill health and, you know, just different knowledge that they're sharing in terms of the medical side of this.

In addition to, you know, the mental health side of this.

Some of these places that only have 4 or 5 people working at it, they don't have a way to do this type of platform.

So we thought, what a wonderful way to get them together, as well as the clinicians that are actually taking care of the patients when they're in the hospital.

And hopefully that way we build bridges and are able to provide more support when these patients leave our walls to go somewhere else where they can get help as well.

I do want people to understand that this is not a choice.

This is a disease.

Just like anything else.

And without getting too deep into the clinical aspects of it, there's almost no difference between this and say, diabetes or any other chronic problems.

It hits those receptors.

You have that craving and there's nothing you can do but meet that craving.

And it takes a lot of work to get out of that cycle.

And we see the same thing with our our diabetic patients, our patients with high cholesterol, any sort of chronic illness.

This is just another one of them.

And the biggest goal of this is to teach the community this is an illness.

It can touch anyone at any time.

It doesn't matter the demographic, it doesn't matter the age, your previous life experience.

Everyone is susceptible to this.

When we started this in 2017, when I was a risk manager, we just knew there was a need, but we didn't know what it was and what to do.

And we worked on that for almost ten years now and we've learned a lot of lessons.

We wouldn't want others to have to go through it.

So if we could teach our partners in the community, these are some of the resources you have in order to get better patient outcomes.

That's the biggest goal that we have today, is just to be able to share our knowledge.

As you have a health, that's what we do every day.

According to the state's drug overdose fatality report, more than 1400 Kentuckians died from our overdose last year.

Last year was also the third year in a row that deadly overdoses dropped.