Educational Activities Archives

In this module participants review how to identify the main principles of pain treatment in opioid use disorder and to describe how these principles are applied to the treatment of acute pain as well as chronic non-terminal, non-cancer pain in OUD. Specifically, participants will learn to manage opioid withdrawal and acute pain in patients with OUD during hospitalization with and without receiving concomitant MOUD. Participants will examine strategies in formulating a multimodal pain plan for chronic pain in patients with OUD.

This activity focuses on buprenorphine for the treatment of chronic pain by reviewing different formulations and the evidence-base supporting its use for chronic pain with and without Opioid Use Disorder. Participants learn how to apply the evidence of buprenorphine’s effectiveness to different patient scenarios.

This activity focuses on foundational elements of equitable, patient-centered care for people with chronic pain, with a specific focus on shared-decision making, functional goal setting and effective communication strategies. Participants learn how to empower people with chronic pain to take an active role in their care through patient-centered care approaches.

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.