Opioid Use Disorder Training in Med School Improves Awareness of Patient Needs

NEW ORLEANS — Adding opioid use disorder (OUD) training to the third-year medical school curriculum improved students’ understanding on how to manage these patients, according to a study presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.

Third-year students’ knowledge of OUD treatments significantly increased from a pre-training assessment (mean score 18.34/23) to a post-training assessment (mean score 19.32/23; P<0.001), reported Kimberly Hu, MD, of the Ohio State University College of Medicine, during her presentation.

The students also showed significant improvements in their overall understanding of current clinical management principles: mean score 3.12/5 at the pre-training assessment increasing to 4.02/5 at the post-training assessment (P<0.001).

By the end of the training, 82% of the students reported that they knew how to manage acute pain, 62% reported that they knew how to manage chronic pain, and 77% reported that they knew how to screen a patient for OUD.

“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 told MedPage Today.

The study was conducted in part to show the need across medical specialties for awareness and knowledge in treating patients with OUD, especially due to the ongoing opioid crisis, Hu said.

Provisional data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics showed that estimated overdose deaths from opioids increased to 75,673 in the 12-month period ending in April 2021, up from 56,064 the year before.

“Every state is actually impacted differently by opioid use disorder,” said session moderator Howard Liu, MD, MBA, chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. “So, we need to make sure that not just psychiatrists, [but] that people from many specialties, are very well versed [in treating OUD].”

The training program consisted of in-person or virtual buprenorphine waiver training, as well as in-person clinical experience through their psychiatric clerkship, for a total of 8 hours from January 2019 to April 2021. Overall, 405 students participated in the training, and completed a pre- and post-training knowledge test. They also completed a self-reported clinical experience survey.

Paired samples t-tests were estimated to assess improvements in knowledge (sum 0 to 23) and approach to clinical management principles (mean 1 to 5) from pre-test to post-test. Frequencies were calculated to determine the proportion of students who reported knowing how to manage acute and chronic pain and how to screen for OUD at the end of the academic year.

Hu said that it will be a challenge to ensure that this training is available to medical students across the country.

“The biggest barrier is emphasizing the importance of this type of education, so that medical schools do feel that it’s worth integrating,” she said. “I think that, overall, if there’s a commitment to integrating this, it’s something that can be done fairly easily.”

To convince more medical schools to incorporate similar training into their curriculum, Hu said that it will require proving the importance and the efficacy of training medical students on this topic. Her team hopes that the small amount of time required and evidence of positive outcomes will encourage medical schools to consider integrating this program into their regular curriculum.