Dr. Jennifer Plumb is a Pediatric Emergency Medicine physician and Professor in the University of Utah Department of Pediatrics and at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is also the Medical Director of Utah Naloxone which is an organization focusing on decreasing the impact of the opioid overdose crisis by equipping individuals and families with naloxone to reverse an opiate overdose. She was born and raised in SLC where her large extended family still lives as well. She attended UCLA for Undergraduate training and the University of Utah for Master’s in Public Health and Medical degrees. Her medical training in Pediatrics was completed at Riley Children’s Hospital/Indiana University and Pediatric Emergency Medicine training was completed at Primary Children’s Hospital. Dr. Plumb is board-certified in Pediatrics and board-certified in Pediatric Emergency Medicine.
Dr. Plumb is actively leading the Department of Pediatrics Opioid Overdose Death Prevention efforts and serves as the Medical Director of the Utah Naloxone program. She educates and trains a variety of individuals and providers across the state on the use of naloxone to save lives from opioid overdose. This includes physician and medical groups, those within the recovery community, groups working with the homeless population, governmental entities, first responder and law enforcement agencies, family groups, and active users. She is a member of multiple statewide and nationwide task forces to address this crisis, serves on the FDA pediatric advisory committee, and is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Substance Use and Prevention (COSUP). She has been involved with the passage of legislation aimed at decreasing Utah’s alarming overdose death and infectious disease transmission rates and has assisted multiple other state’s legislators in working on similar laws. Her academic interests include the impact of naloxone rescue kit availability on opioid overdose deaths, community-based interventions to decrease opioid overdose death and infectious disease transmission, observation medicine, and toxicology.
On a personal level, Dr. Plumb has experience with the devastation created by adolescent substance use and abuse. She lost her brother to a heroin overdose shortly before beginning medical school. She is very committed to the cause of improving the care provided to youth and the resources provided to families in the realm of substance abuse as well as to the importance of education and prevention efforts.
