Racial and ethnic inequities in substance use treatment among women with opioid use disorder

ABSTRACT

Background: Research describes inequities in substance use treatment, but few studies focus specifically on racial and ethnic disparities in a range of aspects of substance use treatment among women with opioid use disorder (OUD).

Objective: To examine whether substance use treatment (i.e. receipt, sources, barriers) differs by race and ethnicity among women with opioid use disorder (OUD) and to identify factors associated with treatment gap (i.e. needing treatment but not receiving it).

Methods: We performed cross-sectional analyses using National Survey on Drug Use and Health 2015–2019 data, restricted to non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic White, and Hispanic women with past-year OUD (unweighted n = 1089). We estimated the prevalence of aspects of treatment among racial and ethnic groups, and used modified Poisson regression to estimate correlates of reported treatment gap.

Results: Approximately 68% of White versus 87% of Black and 81% of Hispanic women with OUD had a treatment gap (p-value 0.0034). Commonly reported barriers to treatment included prioritization, affordability, and stigma. Older age was associated with lower prevalence of treatment gap among all women [prevalence ratio (PR) = 0.83, and 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.76, 0.92], while criminal legal involvement and healthcare coverage was associated with a lower prevalence of treatment gap among Hispanic and White women only (past year arrest: Hispanic women PR = 0.38, 95% CI: 0.17, 0.86; White women PR = 0.62, 95% CI: 0.47, 0.82).

Conclusions: Receipt of treatment is low among women with OUD, especially Black and Hispanic women. Intersectional intervention approaches are needed to increase access and reduce inequities.

KEYWORDS:

• Opioid use disorder
• women
• treatment
• health inequities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00952990.2023.2291748

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NYU Langone Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy Tarlise Townsend Memorial Grant Program.