Advances in Medical Education and Practice (Aug 2019)
A call to maximize impact of the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act through standard inclusion of opioid use disorder treatment curricula in medical schools
Abstract
Aaron Shapiro,1 Lisa R Villarroel,2 Paul George3,41The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA; 2Division of Public Health Preparedness, Arizona Department of Health Services, Phoenix, AZ, USA; 3Department of Family Medicine, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA; 4Office of Medical Education, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USAAbstract: Physicians who want to prescribe buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder require a waiver established by the Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) of 2000, often through completion of an eight-hour training course. This is an issue for a number of reasons, including that opioid overdose deaths continue to rise nationally. However, on October 24, 2018, the SUPPORT (Substance Use-Disorder Prevention that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment) for Patients and Communities Act was signed into law. This bill allows any physician who graduates in good standing from an allopathic or osteopathic medical school in the United States that incorporates necessary material around opioid misuse in their standard curriculum, without need for any additional training, to prescribe buprenorphine. This perspective piece describes why this is an important first step and what more needs to be done within medical education to combat the opioid epidemic.Keywords: opioid use disorder, medical education, buprenorphine waiver
