NYC Health + Hospitals says it sent outreach workers onto construction sites across the city this week, handing out fentanyl test strips, naloxone, and information on where to get help — an overdose-prevention push aimed squarely at the trades, according to the agency's own announcement.

The agency is calling it "Safety Beyond the Worksite." It didn't name which boroughs, which sites, or how many workers its teams actually reached — the release names the program, not the address book, so we're not guessing at numbers it doesn't give.

Here's why a hospital system is showing up at a job site instead of a shelter or a subway platform: construction has one of the worst overdose death rates of any industry in the country. National research compiled by CPWR, the construction industry's own safety and health research center, has repeatedly found tradespeople dying of overdoses at several times the rate of the workforce as a whole — a lot of it traced back to painkillers prescribed after an on-the-job injury that turn into something worse, quietly, with nobody telling the foreman.

For a GC or a super, that's not an abstract public-health stat. It's a guy on your crew you might already be covering for. A five-minute toolbox talk on where to find naloxone is cheap. Losing a worker to an overdose isn't — and there's no OSHA log entry that captures what that actually costs a crew.

The release doesn't list a hotline or a sign-up sheet for site visits, so the move right now is to watch the agency's own page for a follow-up, or have your safety officer reach out through NYC Health + Hospitals' public channels if you want a team at your next toolbox talk. A program like this lives or dies on somebody actually picking up the phone.