Summit County Council has renewed a $6 million budget for Oriana House and is moving to hire a third coroner to help the short-staffed medical examiner’s office with an uptick in opioid-related deaths.
Until that third medical examiner is hired in July, the county will be farming out some autopsies at $1,000 each to out-of-county doctors.
At its Monday meeting, the county council approved $5,921,097 for the 2017 expenses for Oriana House Inc., a private and not-for-profit agency that treats the chemically dependent and coordinates with the county correctional services. The one-year contract has an option for a second year with a cost rising with inflation.
Meanwhile, the county Board of Control, which sizes up new contracts, is mulling a $20,000 deal for Dayton-area pathologist Dr. Robert Shott to examine roughly 20 bodies next year.
Jason Dodson, chief of staff for Summit County Executive Ilene Shapiro, said the county plans to spend $50,000 to $75,000 for outside help to process cadavers in the first half of 2017, after which Dr. Todd Barr will come on board as a full-time examiner.
County administrators have verbally agreed to hire Barr for $160,000 annually. Barr, currently in a fellowship in Cuyahoga County, would start as early as July.
The Summit County Medical Examiner’s office lost one of its three doctors in October, 2015. Despite being short-staffed, coroners were able to process bodies from outside Summit County for a few months. Then the opioid epidemic hit.
Law enforcement in July regularly reported a death among the dozen or so daily overdoses.
Demand for coroners has spiked nationwide.
The salary for the incoming examiner, Dodson said, will be nearly $20,000 higher than the current examiner makes.
“You’ll see that across the entire country there’s a shortage of medical examiners,” Dodson said. “I’ve been here for 10 years. It’s been by far the most difficult search to fill a position.”
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .