Context:
Opioid-related overdoses in the United States have increased by 33% over the past 5 years. America's opioid crisis is increasing across demographic groups and spreading geographically. South Carolina is one of the states in the southern region of the United States that experiences an unusually high rate of opioid-related deaths. In 2016, 616 deaths occurred in South Carolina from drug overdoses from prescription opioid drugs, up 9% from 2015. South Carolina residents filled nearly 4.5 million opioid prescriptions in 2015, which is greater than 1.5 times the national average.
Implementation:
In 2017, the governor of South Carolina declared a statewide public health emergency in response to the growing opioid crisis. In response, a committee of the South Carolina House of Representatives released a report in January 2018 on its opioid abuse prevention study and made recommendations on ways to reduce the number of opioid-related deaths.
Evaluation:
This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of South Carolina's state action plan to combat opioid-related deaths in the context of what other states have done to address opioid abuse, as well as the scientific literature on pain management. Several state opioid action plans, including South Carolina's and West Virginia's, were identified and evaluated.
Discussion:
This article describes (1) several legislative and nonlegislative strategies being considered in South Carolina for addressing the crisis, (2) an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these proposals and how they compare with other states that have also implemented response plans, and (3) an examination of the scientific literature to determine best practices for treating patients who are currently taking opioids, as well as discussing alternative approaches to pain management. The authors make several recommendations to improve upon South Carolina's opioid abuse prevention plan, such as engaging communities and encouraging multistakeholder collaboration to expand access to treatment, particularly among the most vulnerable populations.
Background
Interdisciplinary research teams can increase productivity among academic researchers, yet many junior investigators do not have the training or financial resources to build productive teams. We developed and tested the acceptability and feasibility of three low-cost services to help junior faculty build and maintain their own research teams.
Methods
At an urban academic medical centre, we implemented three types of consultation services: 1) giving talks on evidence-based best practices for building teams; 2) providing easy-to-use team building resources via email; and 3) offering a year-long consultation service—co-led by students—that taught faculty to build and maintain research teams. Our primary outcome was the number of faculty who used each service. For the yearlong consultation service, we asked faculty participants to complete three online self-assessments to rate their leadership confidence, the team’s performance, and which of the consultation components were most helpful. We used descriptive statistics to evaluate faculty assessment scores at three timepoints by comparing median scores and interquartile ranges.
Results
We gave 31 talks on team building to 328 faculty and postdoctoral fellows from 2014 to 2020. Separately, 26 faculty heard about our research team building expertise and requested materials via email. For the consultation service, we helped build or enhance 45 research teams from 2014 to 2020. By the end of the consultation, 100% of the faculty reported they were still maintaining their team. In the initial survey, the majority of participants (95.7%, n = 22) reported having no or few experiences in building teams. Further, when asked to rate their team’s performance at 12-months, faculty highly rated many elements of both teamwork and taskwork, specifically their team’s productivity (6/7 points), morale (6/7 points), and motivation (6/7 points). By the end of the program, faculty participants also highly rated two components of the consultation program: recruitment assistance (7/10 points) and provision of team management tools (7/10 points).
Conclusions
For participating faculty, our program provided valued guidance on recruitment assistance and team management tools. The high demand for team-building resources suggests that junior faculty urgently need better training on how to develop and manage their own team.
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