Educational Activities Archives

Opioids are commonly prescribed for chronic pain, but are also associated with a risk for serious harms, including overdose and opioid use disorder. This course reviews risk factors for opioid misuse, opioid use disorder, and overdose in patients with chronic pain, explains methods for screening and assessing for problematic opioid use, reviews methods for mitigating risks associated with prescribed opioids, and details non-opioid treatment approaches for pain. The course is based on principles in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s guideline on opioids for chronic pain and reviews recent evidence on benefits and harms of opioids.

Participants who engage in this activity learn to identify components of a neurobiological framework/explanatory model for patients with chronic pain and opioid use disorder, discuss complexities involved in differentiating opioid use disorder from chronic pain, and describe how to perform an opioid use disorder evaluation for a patient with chronic pain seen in primary care.

This activity focuses on the foundational components of Motivational Interviewing and how this approach fits into a client centered approach to care. Participants learn how to apply motivational interviewing skills within a pain management framework.

This activity reviews the body’s normal response to stress and also introduces two brief behavioral exercises to aid in stress reduction and present-focused awareness. Patient explanations for both exercises are provided, as are brief experiential exercises. Sample scripts for clinician use are also included. Finally, a synopsis of the evidence for these exercises is reviewed. In short, the two techniques have evidence for moderate benefit, sometimes short-term only, and no evidence for increased risk of harm. They benefit from being brief, easy to teach, portable, and skills-based (thus skills practice likely increases potential for benefit).

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.

Join our 4-session online case-based learning collaborative series focused on treating opioid use disorder. Delve into best practices on Hospital Based Approaches to OUD and explore real-world cases provided by addiction experts, applying knowledge to practical situations. Each session is presented live online and spans 1.5 hours.