IAMSE Winter 2020 WAS Session 1 Highlights

[The following notes were generated by Michele Haight, PhD.]

IAMSE Webinar Series, Winter 2020

Speaker: Lisa Graves
Title: “Responding to the Opioid Crisis: An Educator’s View”
Series: How is Health Science Education Tackling the Opioid Epidemic?

  • Statistics from the current health science literature underscore a progressive increase in opioid-related deaths and highlight the global scope of the opioid crisis.
  • According to a 2017 bibliometric analysis in the NEJM, a one paragraph, Letter to the Editor published in 1980 in the NEJM (Porter & Jick) was largely responsible for advancing the opioid crisis through misinterpretation and misinformation.
  • The antecedents of the opioid crisis in the medical literature provide a unique educational opportunity for all medical educators to guide learners to better interrogate and evaluate the literature used in clinical decision-making.
  • Out of 43 papers reviewed in a 2019 scoping review for Substance Use Education in Medical Schools (Muzyk et al.), only one paper addressed opioids. The paucity of peer-reviewed literature targeting opioid use beckons medical educators to help fill this gap.
  • The “AFMC Response to the Opioid Crisis” is a competency-based, bilingual, online curriculum that is currently under development in Canada. The proposed curriculum is designed to be spiraled, integrated and interleaved across all years of medical student training. The anticipated completion date for the pilot curriculum is 2021. For more information visit: https://afmc.ca/priorities/opioids
  • Medical education strategies currently in use for addressing the opioid crisis include:
    Naloxone training for medical students
    DATA training waiver programs in the UME and GME curricula
    AAMC Opioid Crisis Summit, Washington DC, 2019
  • Recommendations for the development of a comprehensive Substance Use Disorder Curriculum include the following:
    • Engage a broad swath of stakeholders including patients, patients’
      families, community organizations, community physicians, etc. in
      the development of a curriculum.
    • Create a non-stigmatizing lexicon and structured behaviors to
      communicate, discuss, teach and interact with all Substance Use
    • Disorder team members, especially residents.
    • Fuse the perspectives of substance abuse treatment providers and
      pain management providers to address the many psycho-social and
      economic complexities associated with the opioid crisis.
    • Review curricular interventions that have already been done and build
      on these.
    • Share methods, strategies and approaches that have been successful
      and those that have not worked to help others create a more
      informed curriculum.
    • Ensure that the curriculum can be adapted across the physician
      training continuum, UME, GME, CPD.