Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Sikha, Yeboa, Sampong, a lawyer with the Legal Action Center,

who recently co-authored a report about how emergency departments can provide life-saving care for people with substance use disorders,

and also how emergency departments may be violating multiple federal laws if they do not provide

that care. Let's listen.

Sikale-Boa-Sampong, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks so much for having me today.

Now, you work with the Legal Action Center, a nonprofit, and you recently co-authored a report

about emergency departments and hospitals and the potential legal liability

they have for how they treat substance use disorder patients. And I'm wondering if you could just

sort of give me a real quick overview of what the issue is at hand. Sure. Thanks so much. So

really the issue that our report is addressing is what kind of potential legal liability

there may be when emergency rooms are presented with folks who have substance use-related

conditions, so perhaps overdoses or skin infections due to injection drug use,

and what legal liability is triggered when they don't actually provide evidence-based practices

for substance use disorder and instead really focus on the acute treatment of the aspects

...