The Road to Recovery Initiative (R2RI): A Prospective Evaluation of a Novel Program for the Delivery and Coordination of Addiction Care in a Canadian Setting

The consequences of substance use have had a devastating impact on British Columbia’s (BC) healthcare system. Since the declaration of the province’s public health emergency in 2016, over 10,000 British Columbians have died from an overdose. The lack of a coordinated addiction treatment system provincially is a significant contributor to BC’s present state. To address this, Providence Health Care is implementing the Road to Recovery Initiative (R2RI), an innovate model of care to address two aspects of BC’s addiction treatment crisis through: 1) increasing access to on-demand addiction care; and 2) reorganizing existing clinical services to support patients at every phase of recovery. The proposed Program of Research seeks to evaluate key health and social outcomes associated with the implementation of R2RI. Participants of this program will be followed for 5 years with data collection focused on: substance use, illness trajectory, community engagement, health care utilization, health risk behaviours, quality of life, overdose, and death. Knowledge gained through this research will identify outcomes associated with the provision of a coordinated addiction treatment system and will inform successful scale-up of this new approach.