Educational Activities Archives

This 90-minute webinar provides a clear and practical overview of essential supervision practices for both clinical and peer-based professionals working with individuals experiencing opioid, stimulant, and other substance use disorders. Participants will learn key supervision functions, effective communication strategies, documentation expectations, and methods for supporting professional growth while maintaining accountability. The session highlights how quality supervision enhances service effectiveness, supports ethical practice, and promotes workforce sustainability across treatment and recovery support settings.

Motivational interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based approach to guide and enhance conversations when working with patients to promote positive behavior change. Originally developed in the context of treating substance use disorders, MI is a collaborative method of communication that pays particular attention to the language of change. MI helps to strengthen intrinsic motivation for change by exploring the patient’s own reasons for change by communicating the spirit of acceptance, partnership, empowerment, and compassion. This educational activity will introduce key MI concepts, including the four tasks, the spirit of MI, and skills for evoking change talk.

This episode examines how these newer compounds differ pharmacologically, why they are more dangerous, and how clinicians can recognize and respond to kratom-related harms. Listeners will gain practical strategies for identifying kratom use disorder, managing withdrawal, and having informed, non-stigmatizing conversations with patients as these products continue to emerge and change.

Opioid use disorder (OUD) has highly effective FDA-approved medications for its treatment. This course reviews and compares pharmacological treatment options for individuals with OUD, including methadone, buprenorphine (sublingual and injectable formulations), and naltrexone (oral and long-acting intramuscular formulations). Current evidence for each medication is reviewed in detail, and studies comparing each are discussed. The purpose and goal of medications for OUD are reviewed, and different treatment models are presented. The course includes case vignettes in which medication options for OUD are considered.

This course discusses the importance of integrating opioid use disorder (OUD) pharmacotherapy into general medical settings, and describes models in primary care, emergency rooms, and hospitals where medications for OUD treatment are successfully included as standard care. Through reviews of OUD pharmacotherapy implementation in clinical practice, participants will learn how to adapt these strategies to their own settings. The course also introduces evidence-based counseling approaches to enhance motivation, treatment engagement, and sustained remission. Standard Medical Management (SMM) will be highlighted as an efficient, structured option readily incorporated into primary care. Participants are encouraged to adapt this information for use in their own clinical practices.

Lab testing in the assessment of substance use disorders may involve many different substrates, though urine drug testing (UDT) dominates clinical practice. This course is meant to provide a short guide to effective use of lab testing in the treatment of the patient with a substance use disorder, which, to a surprising degree, is often misused or misunderstood. The course describes the clinical role of lab testing to guide treatment and not to be punitive. To properly use and interpret UDT, it reviews common false positives and false negatives that might occur in the immunologic-based first step in UDT. To understand confirmatory gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, it goes on to describe the metabolism of common opioids and benzodiazepines, because the detected substance is often just a downstream metabolite of several possible parent compounds to which the patient was exposed. The course concludes with a discussion of the difference between UDT for clinical purposes versus forensic ones.