Educational Activities Archives

This module focuses on how to approach opioid tapering in the care of patients prescribed long-term opioid therapy for chronic pain who have not been diagnosed with opioid use disorder. It describes patient perspectives on pain and opioid management, and how these may diverge from prescribers’ perspectives. It describes challenges in opioid prescribing, including opioid dependence and withdrawal, and identifies practical approaches to reducing opioids while maintaining a positive patient-clinician relationship. Participants also learn about the role of shared decision-making in opioid tapering.

Participants will be introduced to the vocabulary of addiction and the root causes of addiction especially in the adolescent, as well as the epidemiology of opioid overdoses and deaths in the United States as a public health phenomenon, with particular attention paid to the decreasing rate of illicit opioid use in adolescents over the past decade. The learner will also, with this background, have reinforced the predicates of opioid misuse in adolescents and, through clinical examples, learn how to recognize possible misuse and address misuse in adolescents seen in a medical setting. Finally, safe prescribing principles will be introduced.

This course provides a framework for decision-making around opioid prescribing in individuals with serious illnesses such as cancer who also have a substance use disorder. Clinicians will learn factors to consider, including pain assessment, substance use history, and prognosis, and when buprenorphine might be appropriate to use as a primary medication for pain in the setting of SUD.

In this episode we talk with the current AAAP Visiting Scholars, Drs. Justine Welsh and Anne McBride about how they used this program to do a needs assessment with Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Faculty on addiction training then implemented a lecture series to meet these needs. The goal being to increase knowledge among faculty so that they can turn this into patient care practices but also teach fellows and residents to improve care for young patients with addiction issues.

Due to the opioid epidemic, over 2.5 million adults in the U.S. have opioid use disorder (OUD), yet only 25% of those who need treatment receive recommended medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD). Alongside the rising rates of OUD, there has been an increase in infectious diseases such as HIV, hepatitis B and C, endocarditis and skin and soft-tissue infections, particularly among people who inject drugs. These intertwining epidemics have not been sufficiently addressed, but MOUD — combined with appropriate substance use treatment supports and health care services — represents an opportunity to reduce risk and improve health outcomes.

In this webinar, researchers from the Social Action Lab at the University of Pennsylvania will discuss a novel, virtual social-behavioral intervention, GROV (Grid for Reduction of Regional Vulnerability), which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the DP01 mechanism led by PI Dolores Albarracin. The presentation will showcase how the intervention seeks to foster effective social regulation of community challenges as a way of promoting HIV and HCV testing, preventing overdoses, seeking mental and physical health treatments, establishing social relationships, etc. The research team will delve into the intervention’s design and procedures and share preliminary results during the webinar, followed by a question-and-answer session for attendees.