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

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore.

Our goal is to bring evidence and experience to illuminate critical public health issues.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu.

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

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer, Public Health on Call. Today I talk with Dr. Stephen Patrick, a pediatrician and director of the Vanderbilt Center

for Child Health Policy.

Dr. Patrick is also a former senior policy advisor at the White House Office of National

Drug Control Policy and led a group that created a

report, Substance Use Disorder in Pregnancy, improving outcomes for families. We talk about the importance

of addressing substance use disorder in pregnancy for the well-being of both the pregnant

person and the fetus and the barriers pregnant people face in getting this life-saving care.

Let's listen.

Dr. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us today. Pregnant and postpartum people are an overlooked population who lack access to evidence-based treatment for opioid use disorder.

What do we know about opioid use disorder among this specific group of people?

Well, we know what's been increasing substantially over the last several years.

Diagnoses of opioid use disorder have quadrupled over the last two decades nationwide.

And oftentimes we forget about the specific needs of pregnant people and their children.

So it's important that we address the specific needs that they have and their children. So it's important that we

address the specific needs that they have. What are some of the risks of opioid use disorder

for pregnant people and fetuses in particular? So all of the same risks the general population

...