Investigating women’s socio-structural risk environment of overdose

British Columbia, Canada, continues to grapple with an overdose epidemic. Substantial gaps remain in the implementation and scale up of overdose prevention strategies, including attention to gender equity. Little has been said regarding how marginalized women (trans inclusive) are impacted by the crisis, or how they might be differently navigating overdose risk environments or access to life-saving health services.

The ultimate goal is to generate new evidence to reduce overdose-related harms among women who use drugs and increase the responsiveness of existing and emerging overdose interventions to gender inequities. The objectives of this research program are to:

1. Identify how women’s overdose risk is shaped by evolving individual, social, structural, and environmental factors;
2. Investigate factors that create barriers to (or that facilitate) women’s engagement with existing, novel and emerging overdose prevention interventions; and
3. Document perspectives, experiences, and impact of women who use drugs working in overdose-related interventions to inform how best to optimize their engagement in ongoing and future initiatives.