Lion's Pride Volume 13 (Spring 2020) Volume 13 (Spring 2020) | Page 34

relevant articles related to SIS’s, researchers concluded that SIS’s reduced inappropriate injection litter disposal and levels of public drug injections (Potier et al., 2014). For those people who are homeless or have unstable housing, the implementation of SIS’s is meaningful. For them, once addiction occurs, the public area will be their only option for injection. They may use drugs in the public restroom, in the park, on the sidewalk, or in their temporary tents. When they complete injection, they need to find a place to discard the injection litter or maybe just toss it where they consume drugs. If there is a safe, secure place where these PWID can enter, it will decrease the public injection and inappropriate injection litter discard. In this scenario, SIS’s are significant for these vulnerable groups. Since SIS’s lower the health risk among PWID and their communities, a significant amount of money and healthcare resources is saved. A study completed by Irwin et al. (2017) visualized the beneficial outcome of a hypothetical SIS in Baltimore: one SIS implementation will have $5.98 million annual net saving for Baltimore; 3.7 and 21 new HIV and HVC diagnoses, respectively, can be prevented; more than 300 days of hospitalization due to other infection can be reduced; 5.9 overdose mortality and 108 overdose ambulance calls can be prevented. The study also showed that in most cases, the overdose which occurs in SIS’s doesn’t need further ambulance assistance and hospitalization (Madah-Amiri et al., 2019). Other multiple studies also claimed that