Medical student training effective for opioid use disorder, pain management
NEW ORLEANS —Educating third-year medical students on opioid use disorder and pain management helped prepare them for proper diagnosis and treatment, a speaker said at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.
“What we know is that we have evidence-based treatments for opioid use disorders, but even so, we continue to see a rise in opioid use and a rise in deaths related to opioid use,” Kimberly Hu, MD, of the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University, said in an association-sponsored press conference.
Earlier this month, the CDC reported a 15% rise in overdose deaths in the last year, which totaled more than 107,000. According to Hu, every state saw an increase in overdose deaths, other than Wyoming and Hawaii.
“Why are things getting worse? There are a lot of hypotheses and reasons for why, but one that I'm going to focus on today, and what this study hopes to improve, is future access to care through medical student education,” Hu said.
Hu and colleagues’ study aimed to educate medical students about opioid use disorders and evidence-based treatments for those disorders. The students also received an approved buprenorphine waiver training curriculum. The study, which is ongoing, provided 405 third-year medical students with in-person clinical experiences from January 2019 to April 2021.
At the end of the year, 162 students completed a survey. A total of 82% said they felt they knew how to manage acute pain; 62% said they knew how to manage chronic pain; and 77% said they knew how to screen a patient for an opioid use disorder.
“This is really significant because if students are able to screen their patients in any specialty they eventually choose to go into, then they can help link these patients with resources early and make sure that there aren't patients who are slipping through the cracks,” Hu said. “The take-home points are that training medical students in opioid use disorder and its treatment improves knowledge and understanding of clinical principles, and they also better prepare students to treat patients with opioid use disorder.”