A foundational process necessary to ensure implementation across multiple sectors and address all four pillars of the WECOS was to mobilize a small group of community leaders representing community organizations from each pillar of Prevention/Education, Harm Reduction, Treatment, and Enforcement. This leadership is tasked with ensuring the feasibility of suggested interventions as well as assisting in the implementation of effective, local and sustainable solutions for opioid use and overdose prevention. Effort was made to include people with lived experience to ensure they have direct input into the high-level planning of the strategy.
The Windsor-Essex Community Opioid Strategy Leadership Committee (WECOS-LC) is a collaboration of stakeholders from public health, emergency services, law enforcement agencies (federal drug prosecution, Windsor, LaSalle and Amherstburg Police Services, OPP), the Local Health Integration Network, the City of Windsor, County of Essex, Windsor-Essex hospitals, addiction and mental health service providers, harm reduction agencies, education sector, pharmacy(s), and the community through peer representation.
The WECOS-LC has committed to the ongoing development and implementation of a community based opioid strategy that will reduce the burden of opioid related social and health issues in our community. Members of WECOS-LC are interested in mobilizing individual and shared efforts to encourage collective impact on the health and social issues of problematic opioid use (Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, 2017).