ETSU was recently one of seven universities in the country to receive a portion of the Rural Health Research Center grant, which totaled $2.77 million collectively.
There is a proverb that can be found in both the Jewish Talmud and the Muslim Quaran that goes, “To save one life is to save the world entirely”. Living true to this quote, ETSU has been working hard in expanding and improving the quality and availability of their research of the local opioid epidemic.
The grant, which was awarded by the Health Resources and Services Administration in collaboration with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, will be used to create the ETSU Center for Substance Misuse in Rural America. The Health Resources and Services Administration’s Federal Office of Rural Health Policy allocates over $100 million per year to communities around the nation as part of its Rural Communities Opioid Response Program, providing a rich opportunity for the ETSU center to inform rural health policy and practice.
The ETSU Center for Rural Health Research was founded in 2019 by Gov. Bill Lee to identify new mechanisms to improve health in rural and non-urban communities. Each research center is required to select a key focus area important to rural health policy and conduct nationally relevant studies to inform evidence and practice that will improve access to care and rural health outcomes.
This new funding will create more opportunities to research the opioid crisis to help us understand how to properly eliminate the issue and learn how to successfully help those who have been affected.
Drug abuse is hardly a situation that affects only one person. It messes with each and every aspect of your life and those who know and love you. For this reason, it is a tremendous responsibility for our university to have such a resource available for the students and the community.
