Strategies

Offer group educational, social, creative, musical, or physical activities that promote social interactions, regular attendance, and community involvement among older adults

Establish an ongoing relationship between an older youth or young adult and a younger child or adolescent, usually an elementary or middle school student

Use specialized courts to offer criminal offenders with drug dependency problems an alternative to adjudication or incarceration

Support organized social, art, or physical activities for school-aged youth outside of the school time

Use specialized courts to work with parents involved in the child welfare system who may lose custody of their children due to substance abuse

Establish policies, plans, and programs that meet the needs of all residents of a community, especially children and older adults, and promote interaction and cooperation between individuals of different generations

Provide medications such as methadone to individuals diagnosed with opioid use disorder in outpatient, residential, and hospital settings, usually with counseling and behavioral therapies; often called MAT

Use regulation to extend nurse practitioners’ (NPs’) scope of practice to provide care to the full scope of their training and skills without physician oversight, especially for primary care

Improve work environments for nurses via establishment of strong nursing leadership, organizational support, etc.

Make clinician, hospital, clinic, long-term care facility, and insurance plan performance on health care quality measures publicly available via report cards, reporting websites, or similar tools