Last week, Mayor Catherine E. Pugh and I convened all 11 hospitals in Baltimore to announce our partnership to combat the opioid epidemic. Addiction is a disease. Treatment for it cannot be siloed and stigmatized.

Baltimore City hospitals have done exceptional work already. Nearly all of our City’s ERs offer medication-assisted treatment on demand and peer recovery specialists, something true of no other major city in America. Through my standing order for naloxone, more than 36,000 residents have been trained to use the antidote medication, and these residents have saved more than 1,900 lives. Law enforcement and health officials teamed up to start a program that allows residents arrested for low-level drug offenses the opportunity to choose treatment and case management instead of prosecution. In March, we announced the opening of our Stabilization Center, a first-of-its-kind 24/7 urgent care facility dedicated to issues of addiction and mental health.

Still, we have much more to accomplish. Each year, we lose more and more of our residents to opioid addiction. Last summer, Mayor Pugh and I presented an out-of-the-box solution to the opioid epidemic: fully connecting addiction treatment with our hospitals. That call rested on a simple premise: Addiction is a disease, and we should respond to it accordingly. No hospital would deny patients care if they had diabetes or cancer; we must treat addiction in the same way.

Last week, we launched a project that will help realize this vision. The Health Department is working with our hospital systems to create “levels of care” that enshrine best practices for responding to the epidemic and publicly recognize hospitals that implement those practices. The project is based on a similar initiative in Rhode Island, one of the only places in the country where the number of overdoses went down last year, rather than up.

Please see the op-ed that Mayor Pugh and I wrote in The Baltimore Sun recently on this subject. You can also watch parts of the Levels of Care press conference or read more about the initiative in the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Magazine, Baltimore Fishbow, Fierce Healthcare, WJZ, WEAA, WBAL, and WBAL Radio.

Now, we want to hear what you think. Our proposal is being developed with the active partnership of all of our hospitals. We want to hear from our community partners. Together, we can build upon the work that’s already been done and make Baltimore City a national model for treating addiction alongside every other disease. That means treating addiction in the places where medical treatment is best delivered: in our traditional health care institutions — hospitals included.

Finally, an important recognition: This week is National Nurses Week. I am honored to work with hundreds of dedicated nurses at the Health Department who treat children with chronic conditions in our school health suites, who care for patients in our clinics, and who improve health and well-being of our residents. Today and every day, we honor our nurses.

Leana Wen, M.D., M.Sc.

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