The Windsor-Essex County Health Unit is looking for more partners to combat opioid addiction.
Representatives attended Essex County Council yesterday to give a program report.
They took the opportunity to ask council to provide a representative for the Windsor-Essex Community Opioid Strategy Leadership Committee.
The plan is to create an opioid abuse and overdose prevention and response plan for the region.
Director of Health Promotion Nicole Dupuis says the committee plans to get someone from Windsor City Council on board too.
"Quite a big group of leaders, all police services, hospitals, city administration," she says. "For the city of Windsor we're also requesting a representative from the city council so we have that political representation there."
She told AM800 News everyone is aware of how urgent the matter of opioid use has become, and that it's going to take a team effort to come up with a strategy that will enact actual change.
"I think it really requires everybody to work together to come up with strategies," she says. "We have done some work already. We've done an environmental scan with our treatment providers to identify where they see the issues. We hope to do a little bit more consultation with folks with lived experience to see what they feel are relevant strategies."
Work is already underway, but Dupuis says an action plan still needs to worked out before it can be rolled out to the public.
"We're working on that now and we'll get to a point when we'll be able to talk about that publicly, and have open feedback on what our strategy looks like for Windsor," says Dupuis. "Other communities are a little further ahead and have already done this like that such as Toronto or Waterloo, so we're sort of following in their footsteps, but there is a lot going on."
For more information on the Windsor-Essex Community Opioid Strategy visit their website.