Training sessions in Branson May 10 and 11 are aimed at getting more people with substance use disorders into treatment.
Both are offered by CoxHealth and funded by a Skaggs Legacy Endowment grant and are provided by the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Friday's session will focus on teaching providers how to better recognize someone struggling with addiction. It will also provide them with tools to screen patients and will teach them how to treat those patients.
"Getting into a specialist is sometimes very difficult, especially in the addiction medicine field because there aren't a lot of addiction medicine providers. And, so, this opens it up to primary care, internal medicine, emergency room doctors, OB/GYNs that are seeing those patients every week, you know, for something else and could possibly help to identify someone who could be caught in the earlier stages and work in more of a preventative or proactive manner," said Marietta Hagan, population health project coordinator for the Stone and Taney Counties Substance Use Initiative.
Another session Saturday will be training that’s required for providers to apply for a waiver with the DEA to allow them to prescribe buprenorpine. It’s a medication to treat opioid use disorder.
"It's a very good medication. It's the gold standard, really, among substance use disorder and opioid use disorder treatment," she said, "but that is a barrier to physicians is having to get that training and that waiver, so we're trying to reduct those barriers by bringing it here to our area."
According to Hagan, the trainings are one more step they’re taking to reduce and prevent substance abuse disorders.
