Developing a Competence-Based Addiction Medicine Curriculum in Indonesia: The Training Needs Assessment

Abstract

Indonesia has one of the fastest growing, injecting drugs user-driven, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemics in Asia. Coverage of needle and syringe programs (NSPs), opioid substitution therapy (OST), and antiretroviral treatment (ART) is increasing, but is still low, whereas professional training in addiction medicine is not yet established. Urgent development and scaling-up of professional capacity in comprehensive, evidence-based addiction medicine is needed. In this article the results of the first step is presented, being the training needs assessment (TNA) and the process of further developing a national evidence- and competence-based addiction medicine curriculum in Indonesia.

Effectiveness and Organization of Addiction Medicine Training Across the Globe

“…Of the 29 articles included in this review, nine studies reported on surveys on the need for addiction medicine training (table 1) [23,24,27,47,48,49,50,51,52]. These studies did not relate directly to the specific objectives of our study.…”

“…However, in almost half of other postgraduate medical training curricula, no time is allocated to topics related to addiction medicine [47]. All studies found that faculties consider addiction medicine training highly relevant, but at the same time report a lack of availability of adequate training programs [23,24,27,47,48,49,50,51,52]. …”

“…Six of the 29 published articles on training in addiction medicine included in this review were published between 1998 and 2003, ten between 2003 and 2008 and 13 between 2008 and 2013. Of particular interest is the special issue on training in addiction medicine published by Substance Abuse in 2011, where several addiction medicine curricula from various countries were outlined [23,52,59,60,61]. …”

“…One study described the results of a systematic training needs assessment (TNA) in Indonesia [23]. The TNA questionnaire had three professional domains modeled on the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) training needs assessment tool [23].…”

“…However, not all medical doctors consider SUDs a medical condition, and as such do not consider treatment of these patients as their domain of treatment [18,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]. Moreover, it has been shown that negative perceptions of patients with SUDs, for example, considering them as criminals, dangerous or treatment resistant, fuel negative attitudes toward these patients [20,21,22,29].…”