Cooper EMS, Addiction Medicine Featured on CNN for Game-changing Bupe FIRST Protocol

Cooper’s EMS and Addiction Medicine teams were featured recently on “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper” for their pioneering work in connecting people who have suffered life-threatening opioid overdoses with long-term opioid use disorder care. The show’s entire hour was dedicated to the state of the opioid epidemic in America and the ways public health professionals have adapted their response to account for the introduction of fentanyl and other substances into the drug supply. Reporter Kate Bolduan also told the stories of four women struggling with substance use in different ways, and the ways their lives have changed as a result.

One shining light in the episode was Cooper’s novel Bupe FIRST (or Buprenorphine Field Initiation of Rescue Treatment by EMS) program, an initiative that equipped Cooper EMS teams with doses of buprenorphine, a drug commonly used to treat opioid use disorder. Before Bupe FIRST, teams could resuscitate someone undergoing an overdose using naloxone, but that person would often quickly feel powerful withdrawal symptoms and refuse further treatment.

“[Naloxone] is a short-acting opioid blocker. It’s a rescue medication. It saves a lot of lives, but just saving somebody and getting somebody into treatment, that’s two different things,” Cooper paramedic Eric Tuttle told CNN. “You keep saving the same people over and over again, but until you get them into treatment, you’re not changing anything.”

Bupe FIRST equipped EMS teams in Camden with buprenorphine, an opioid which can quickly lessen withdrawal symptoms for someone who recently received naloxone. The idea behind Bupe FIRST is that once a person’s withdrawal symptoms are eased, they may be more willing to engage and enter treatment for their disease.

“We would still try to talk to them and tell them that there is treatment available, but a lot of times those patients, they were so far into withdrawal after receiving the Narcan, they just wanted to get away before the withdrawal got worse,” Tuttle said. “Once you treat the withdrawal you can have a better conversation.”

And, as shown on in the CNN piece, the results are clear.

In 2022, the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Emergency Medicine published an article by Cooper physicians and researchers which showed that a person who received buprenorphine directly after being resuscitated following an overdose is six times more likely to be in long-term addiction treatment within 30 days.

Click here to watch the special. Click here to read the article.