Aim: After a governmental funding to supplement medical expenditure for individual patients attending methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) clinics in January 2019 in Taiwan, many clinics continued to experience difficulties in maintaining the service. Hence, another funding called Accessibility Enhancement Program (AEP) was initiated in September 2019 to provide extra financial support for the institutions to better manage the MMT clinics serving 150 participants or less per month. This study aims to evaluate whether the AEP help alleviate the participant reduction in these MMT clinics. Methods: The monthly numbers of participants were extracted from the governmental statistics. We applied the single interrupted time series analysis to compare the periods before (January-August 2019) and after (September-December 2019) the launch of the AEP till the pandemic outbreak. Based on the number of participants served per month, the MMT clinics were categorized into tiny- (1- 50), small- (51-100) and medium-scale (101-150) for stratification analysis. Results: Before the AEP intervention, all the MMT clinics in three types of scale exhibited persistent participant reduction. After the AEP intervention, the participant reduction of these clinics was alleviated and, instead, exhibited an overall increase of 1.03 participants per month. The post-intervention increase was most prominent among the clinics of medium-scale, with a slope increase of 2.23 participants per month (p-value = 0.0002), whereas the impact was not detectable among the clinics of tiny- or small-scale. Conclusions: Direct governmental funding such as AEP to MMT clinics not only maintain the accessibility but also alleviate the participant reduction. Although the effect was limited to the clinics of medium-scale, this study revealed a possible impact of government intervention to the operation of the MMT clinics. Future modification of the content of AEP funding might be effective to MMT clinics of other scales.
Date:
2024-07-01
Relation:
Drug and Alcohol Dependence. 2024 Jul 01;260(Suppl.):Meeting Abstract 110496.
