Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Interprofessional Team-Based Opioid Education

Students


Nexus Summit Seminar Showcase

Thank you for attending “Tried and tested: Strategies to implement virtual synchronous interprofessional education sessions using standardized patients.”

The handout is available here.

The slides are available here.



Thank you for your interest in the Interprofessional Team-based Opioid Education program. This website provides educational materials for team-based training
designed for health profession students and/or primary care practice teams that care for patients who take and/or potentially misuse opioids.

Background

A rise in opioid overdose rates in the United States has been defined as an “opioid epidemic,” requiring a closer look at how opioids are prescribed.1,2 Additionally, millions of people suffer with opioid use disorder (OUD) and admit to misuse of prescription opioids.1,2 All health care professions have a role to play in reducing this public health crisis. Chronic pain is also a common, disabling and costly public health issue. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Pain Management Best Practices Inter-agency Task Force Report (2019) calls for a better trained workforce armed with a multidisciplinary team-based approach to assess, treat, and manage the care of patients with pain. Personalized, patient-centered strategies to prevent and treat chronic pain must be balanced with efforts to curb inappropriate opioid prescribing and use practices.3 We must start early, educating tomorrow’s health care providers about interprofessional team-based tactics for pain management and opioid misuse prevention.4 Simultaneously, we must also educate today’s primary care teams on current best practices for treating chronic pain and preventing consequences of opioid misuse.5

Program description

The Interprofessional Team-based Opioid Education program provides educational materials for a team-based training program designed for health-professions students and/or primary care practice teams that care for patients with chronic pain who take and may misuse opioids.

The academic student trainings are available in multiple versions to accommodate various interprofessional education (IPE) settings. The trainings are designed for students from nursing, pharmacy, medicine, social work, and other health professions programs. The academic versions include all components that instructors need to implement this curriculum with interprofessional teams of students. More information about the academic trainings is available here.

The primary care/clinical version of the training program consists of an in-person, case-based simulation using standardized patients (2 hours) or video scenarios (1 hours) for training interprofessional teams of primary care providers/prescribers (PCP’s), nurses, medical assistants, pharmacists, social workers and behavioral health professionals. The team-based clinic interprofessional training can be delivered on-site or virtually facilitated by a content expert from our team, offered at no charge to clinical practices in WA state. Out-of-state facilitation can be negotiated upon request. For further information and/or to schedule a primary practice-based training please email to medicine.ipoc@wsu.edu. More information about the development team and funding sources is available here.

References:

  1. United States Department of Health and Human Services [HHS]. (2017). What is the U.S. opioid epidemic? Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html
  2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]. (2019). CDC guideline for prescribing opioids for chronic pain. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/prescribing/guideline.html
  3. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS]. (2019, May). Pain management best practices inter-agency task force report. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/ash/advisory-committees/pain/reports/index.html
  4. Interprofessional Education Collaborative. (2016). Core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice: 2016 update. Washington, DC: Interprofessional Education Collaborative.
  5. Six Building Blocks. Retrieved from https://depts.washington.edu/fammed/improvingopioidcare/

Interprofessional Opioid Curriculum is licensed to Washington State University under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Please refer to the Creative Commons license link for terms of use.