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Halting a Crisis: Statewide Opioid Curriculum Summit at NEOMED

This article is the 16th in a series about the epidemic of opioid addiction and how NEOMED is training future physicians and pharmacists to help.

A four-year common curriculum designed to train medical students in Ohio to help halt the crisis of opiate addiction is coming, thanks to a large national grant awarded to Northeast Ohio Medical University and five sub-awardees. Faculty have been working to design new curriculum and training modules  and on Thursday, Aug. 29, and Friday, Aug. 30, representatives from participating schools will meet at NEOMED to present topics at the Curriculum Summit of the All-Ohio Medical School Opioid Use Disorder Collaborative.

A third day, Saturday, Aug. 31, will be devoted to Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) Certification Training, sponsored by the Ohio Mental Health and Addiction Services and SAMHSA.

Content experts from all participating medical schools will lead sessions at the summit, using a ‘’train the trainer” model based on a framework published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Curriculum materials will be available online to faculty at all Ohio medical schools so they may adapt the content to meet the needs of learners at their institutions.

The $500,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (OhioMHAS) was awarded to NEOMED to work with the other six medical schools in Ohio in a collaborative effort to develop a common curriculum on pain management and opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment. The other schools are Case Western Reserve University, Ohio University, The Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Toledo and Wright State University.