A Collaboration Between Government and the Continuing Education Community Tackles the Opioid Crisis: Lessons Learned and Future Opportunities

Abstract

In 2016, 116 people died each day from opioid-related drug overdoses and in 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. During the preceding years, the continuing education (CE) accreditors in the health professions identified a need for a strategic, coordinated effort that would involve an interprofessional coalition of multiple stakeholders to respond to this emerging public health challenge. The Conjoint Committee on Continuing Education, a national coalition of organizations in the professions of medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, and physician assistants, stepped up to assume a leadership position. To address the scope of safety issues involved in opioids, the US Food and Drug Administration required that extended-release and long-acting opioid analgesic product manufacturers make training available to prescribers of their products and recommended that the training should be conducted by accredited, independent CE providers. CE accreditors in the health professions initiated an unprecedented collaboration that leveraged the accredited CE community to deliver prescriber education as part of the Food and Drug Administration Opioid Analgesics Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy. This article describes the history of this interprofessional collaboration including lessons learned and opportunities for future collaboration to address public health issues.

The Role and Rise of Interprofessional Continuing Education

“…12 IPCE is a key resource for addressing public-health issues, such as chronic diseases, antibiotic resistance, infectious disease outbreaks and the opioid crisis. 13 All members of the team have a crucial role in addressing these issues.…”

A multi-year retrospective quantitative implementation evaluation of Safer Opioid Prescribing, an opioid prescribing continuing education program for Canadian healthcare providers

“…There was an inequitable distribution of harms, with greater rates of overdoses and deaths from opioids in rural and remote communities -places where there might be less access to practice supports and high quality CHPE programs (29). 4. Chronic pain was a major learning priority for family physicians (30,31) and there were important knowledge gaps with respect to opioid prescribing (32).…”

“…Opioid manufacturer promotions couched as educational activities have been prominent drivers of inappropriate prescribing and opioid-related harms (3). Consequently, continuing health professional education (CHPE) without industry involvement has been considered an important rectifying intervention for the ongoing opioid epidemics in Canada and the United States, as identi ed by a variety of national and regional policy documents (4)(5)(6), editorialists (7,8) and national media (9).…”

A retrospective quantitative implementation evaluation of Safer Opioid Prescribing, a Canadian continuing education program

“…Continuing health professional education (CHPE) without industry involvement has been considered an important rectifying intervention as identified by a variety of national and regional policy documents [ 10 – 12 ], editorialists [ 13 , 14 ], and national media [ 15 ]. The Canadian government has made continued major investments in chronic pain and opioid CHPE as part of its opioid crisis response strategy [ 16 ].…”