Category: Addiction

Posts by Jano Klimas about addiction and substance use disorders, including epidemiology, prevention, education, assessment and treatment.

Expanding opioid agonist therapy while learning from HIV/AIDS

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This post elaborates on the ideas from a recent freely-available commentary published in the journal Addiction.

Accessing opioid agonist therapy (OAT) and maintaining good adherence faces many barriers which can be geographical, financial, regulatory, situational or logistic. In some settings, lack of services hinders access to treatment for people living with opioid use disorder (OUD). In other settings—even where health‐care and medications are provided free of charge—many people who have OUD do not seek OAT. In the United States, recent ‘estimates suggest a gap between treatment need and capacity of 1.4 and 1.3 million in 2012, respectively’ [4]. The ongoing epidemic of OUD needs to develop strategies to recruit and keep patients on OAT.

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Irish Canadian project highlights global issue

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This toolkit is based on a study that aimed to establish the feasibility and accessibility of training primary care practitioners in addiction medicine.

In particular how international models of addiction medicine training might inform the future of development of General Practice education in Ireland.

 

The study had three phases: in the first phase we conducted a literature review, the second phase assessed needs in both systems. And in the third phase we explored the feasibility of the education.

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