Session: Community-Academic Partnerships to Improve Research Infrastructure Focused on Improving Opiate Use Treatment Recovery Services (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Background: Strong community-academic partnerships have been shown to improve the relevance and receptibility of results by increasing studies internal validity and generalizability. Building these partnerships requires an investment of time and resources necessary to jointly develop research questions, study aims, and measurement approaches that meet the needs of both academic researchers and community partners. Building strong and valuable community-academic partnerships takes time, hard work, and commitment from researchers and community members that is often not built into the behavioral health and substance use organizational infrastructure. However, given the time and resources these partnerships can grow trust between community groups and academic partners and increase research infrastructure and capacity within the community organizations. Approach: In response to the growing need for these collaborations, Innovations in Recovery Research (IRIS) launched at University of Maryland in 2020 as a 4-year R24 grant project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s HEAL Initiative. The project aims to develop strong recovery research infrastructure through academic-community partnerships to build an evidence-base for recovery support science. While maintaining a peer, person centered, and community focused core, IRIS provides technical, data infrastructure, and research capacity assistance, through multiple means including pilot projects. To help create these pilot projects, IRIS solicited submissions from community-based organizations, including the State of Maryland, to help develop and analyze recovery methods and ideas. Presented Projects: In this symposium three of the IRIS’ pilot projects will be discussed. The pilot projects presented focus on decreasing recovery-oriented stigma in health care settings, development of a measure to quantify changes in quality of life for homeless individuals with opiate use disorder, and implementation of recovery support services throughout the state of Maryland. The first presentation will be of a pilot project awarded to the peer led organization, On Our Own Maryland (OOOM) which conducted anti-stigma training in substance use treatment provider organizations and local behavioral health departments. IRIS helped OOOM develop stigma measures, pretest and posttest surveys, and analyze the collected data with qualitative coding and bivariate statistical analysis. The second presentation will report findings from the IRIS funded project in collaboration with People Encouraging People (PEP), a community behavioral health provider. PEP, relying on peer specialist feedback and adapting EUROHIS QOL-8 language, developed a survey administered in a street outreach setting aimed at furthering the knowledge of early factors related to recovery and individual change in quality of life. The third presentation will feature a study conducted in collaboration with the State of Maryland to conduct a community scan of opiate recovery services offered by Maryland’s 24 Local Behavioral Health Authorities. This study reviewed Maryland Department of Health documentation, online searches, and recovery support services funding records to assess discrepancies across the jurisdictions. Conclusion: In this symposium, IRIS will present data, findings, and implications alongside community partners, that demonstrates how researchers and community partners in the behavioral health and substance use field, with a focus in opioid recovery, work together to develop research and evidence-based practices.