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Publication Date

6-28-2024

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Presentation: 12:08

Poster attached as supplemental file below

Abstract

“Harm Reduction: A Toolbox for PA professionals” focuses on equipping students with the necessary tools to be able to identify patients with substance use disorder (SUD), identifying different harm reduction tools available to the public, and how these can be implemented into different health settings to better the health of our patients. Three different health settings were chosen as focal points: the emergency department, inpatient medicine, and primary care. Out of these three settings, the one thing that remained consistent was the harsh reality that the opioid epidemic has exponentially risen thus providing a window of opportunity for healthcare providers to share these available community resources that can be used with patients. While harm reduction can come in many forms, the three concepts focused on within our poster and flash talk were fentanyl testing strips, motivational interviewing with patients, and prescribed needle syringes. The benefits found with these three techniques have been making the personal decision to change drug use behaviors, mitigating transmissible diseases or preventable health outcomes as a result of SUD, and meeting patients with where they are at in order to provide education on available harm reduction resources within the community that they could benefit from. By sifting through various studies and gathering pertinent information, we have built these three care modules centered around harm reduction for the 2025 Physician Assistant (PA) cohort to try to integrate into the didactic PA program to educate our colleagues and shed light on an imperative public health initiative such as Harm Reduction.

Lay Summary

The physician assistant (PA) education is a rigorous year of in-class learning followed by a clinical year and covers a host of topics aimed at preparing students to become well-rounded, competent healthcare professionals. Public health education is multidisciplinary training covering several areas of focus with a goal of teaching professionals approaches to promoting health, preventing disease, and prolonging life. As dual degree students at Thomas Jefferson University (TJU), we had the unique opportunity to go through both of these educational programs. In doing so, we noticed parts of the PA education that could be improved if more public health topics were included in the education. Specifically, we believe the concept/principle of harm reduction for patients with substance use disorder (SUD) would be a helpful topic for PA students to learn before entering the clinical year of their education. Harm reduction is the concept of using different strategies to minimize the negative consequences of certain behaviors. Since encountering patients with SUD is very common in clinical practice, and most people with SUD aren’t seeking treatment, this topic is relevant and important for PA students to learn about. The main goal of this project was to create a curriculum that would educate TJU PA students about harm reduction for patients with SUD prior to their clinical year. To do this, we built self-paced, PowerPoint-based learning lessons that could easily be shared with TJU PA students. These modules consisted of an introductory lesson and three main modules focused on harm reduction strategies in specific care settings. The introductory lesson provides students with an overview of SUD, harm reduction, and how patients with SUD utilize the healthcare system. The main lessons focused on the three care settings in which patients with SUD most commonly present - emergency medicine, inpatient medicine, and primary care. In building each lesson, we searched the literature to ensure that we used the most up to date and evidenced-based harm reduction strategies. This paper provides our findings from those literature reviews in addition to the PowerPoint slides from our created lessons. In the future, we plan to share this curriculum with the following cohort of dual degree students to ensure it is implemented for TJU PA students prior to their clinical year.

Additional Files
202406_Harwood_Legeer_Seltzer_poster.pptx (1368 kB)

Language

English

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