Traditionally, nursing and physician education have been separated through separate programmes despite working closely together in real-world practice.
Our Perspective in the Journal of Addiction Nursing, we argue that addiction training for nurses is as important as training physicians to heal the growing divide between recent discoveries in addiction science and the inadequate care delivered to people with substance use disorders, mostly by unskilled lay personnel.
Interdisciplinary education between physicians, nurses and other allied health providers can promote collaboration and improve decision-making to optimize approaches to patient care.
Why nursing education in addiction medicine matters
Nurses play an essential role in assessing and treating the full range of substance use disorders. Unfortunately, there is a systemic lack of curricula and comprehensive training programmes for nurses to learn and practice evidence-based addiction care. This lack has negative impact on nurses’ knowledge and skills, and, as a result, millions of people have suffered. Addiction science has increasingly identified a range of evidence-based approaches to treat substance-use disorders, particularly through early identification and treatment. However, most treatments are not used enough and well. Better nursing education can improve accurate use of evidence-based treatments.
To this end, a promising initiative has recently been launched at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and St. Paul’s hospital, i.e., an Addiction Nursing Fellowship. The fellowship provides 12 months of specialised training for nurses. In addition, they obtain research training through intensive mentorship. They can publish research manuscripts, visit academic half-days, journal clubs and conferences. They receive media training, learn to influence public policy, advocate for patients, and lead academic research projects.
Thus, while addiction medicine fellowships for physicians exist in many settings and play an important role in bridging the gap between science and practice in clinical care, the impact of these fellowships may be increased by training nurses and other allied health professionals alongside physicians. Nurses have huge potential of nurses to improve access to care and quality of life for people with substance use disorders. That’s why we need more nurse-specific fellowships, better undergraduate curricula in addiction nursing, and interdisciplinary training opportunities.
Source: Voon, P., Johnson, C., Small, W., Klimas, J. (2017) Nursing Fellowship in Addiction Medicine: A Novel Programme in a Canadian setting. Journal of Addiction Nursing 28(3):148-149, July/September 2017.