Welcome to addiction and its treatment, clinical skills for healthcare providers. Let's start with a simple question. If you could save a patient's life just by asking them a few questions, would you? Hopefully you're nodding in agreement. Of course the answer is yes. That's why you chose to work in the medical field. You want to help people. Asking questions is the core of addiction assessment and treatment. By going through this course, you will learn how to ask questions, what questions to ask, and then what to do with the answers in order to guide your patients to and through recovery. I'm Dr. Ellen Edens from Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry. I'm the coordinator of the education curriculum for the Yale addiction fellowships. The majority of my teaching focuses on treating substance use disorders, and also on the overlap between chronic pain and substance-use. I also co-direct the opiate reassessment clinic and the interprofessional fellowship in addiction treatment based out of the VA hospital in West Haven Connecticut. This course is taught by seven Yale instructors representing three schools, and spanning four programs. You'll hear from all seven of us and begin to see not only how many disciplines address substance use disorder treatment, but also how we interact. Working as an interprofessional team is essential to treating substance use disorders, a condition which affects so many aspects of a person's life. In the course, each module is designed to answer several key questions regarding addiction treatment. Module 1 helps you answer the question, why should I care about patients with substance use disorders? Even if you have no desire to become an addiction specialist, having some basic knowledge will benefit you and your patients, and we'll explain why. Module 2 answers the question, how do I know if my patient has a substance use disorder? Hint, they probably won't tell you without a little probing. This module prop primarily cover screening and diagnosis. Module 3 brings you to the question of, so I have a patient with a substance use disorder, but what's next? Where do I start and helping them make changes? This doesn't have to be daunting and you will learn how to advise a patient towards starting treatment. Module 4 covers the question, what medications are proven to help patients manage their substance use disorders? Specifically, you'll understand the basic pharmacologic options for nicotine, alcohol, and opiate use disorders. Module 5 reviews what psycho-social and behavioral therapies are available. In this module, you will familiarize yourself with and be able to recommend self-help approaches and evidence-based therapies that have been shown to help the individual and their family and moving toward positive change. Finally, Module 6 helps you answer, so what am I missing? What other external factors can help or hurt my patient's odds of successful recovery? In this module, you will explore how structural determinants of health and current US policies impact the treatment landscape and access to care. Moving throughout these modules, you will see the clinical skills brought to life in a modeled case featuring Dr. Ayana Jordan from the School of Medicine and a mock patient named Michael Campbell. In these simulated clips, you can test your knowledge and actively observe how a checkup about chronic back pain evolves into the development of a treatment plan for opiate use disorder. Another optional activity we will guide you through is how to find various treatment modalities in your own community. This will culminate in a resource map that will help you refer your patients to treatment services in the local area. We know your time is valuable. We have the same job as you do and we're all crazy busy, so we'll get right to the point. We have done our best to distill the lessons to provide the most critical need to know material. We hope you apply the clinical skills in your everyday life because the fact is only one in 10 people that need treatment actually receive treatment. It is highly probable that everyday you are seeing patients who either have, or will likely develop a substance use disorder. Together we can jump over the hurdles of stigma and help patients and their loved ones. Thank you for taking this first step.
