4th Edition of Psychiatry and Addiction World Conference 2026

Abstract

Alabama’s health professions schools have many common goals when it comes to educating their students about substance use disorder (SUD) and pain, but a statewide consistent SUD and pain management curriculum did not exist in Alabama. The ALAbama Health professionals' Opioid and Pain management Education (ALAHOPE) project set out to create an interprofessional curriculum around SUD and pain management that all Alabama health professions schools can use to promote consistent evidence-based teaching and a patient-centered approach around these two topics. ALAHOPE provides anyone, anywhere with free education around pain and prescribing practices.

The target audience for this curriculum includes students in schools of medicine, nursing, physician’s assistant, occupational therapy, physical therapy, optometry, podiatry, social work, and counseling. The curriculum was also scaled for free CME credit for these health professions. Moreover, this education is being offered at a critical time when the post-COVID-19 era is still seeing an increase in patients’ mental health challenges that are often correlated with SUD, lack of providers with knowledge to recognize, prevent, and treat SUD, and changes in the illicit drug supply of the US, including lethal fentanyl and other drugs not intended for human consumption. Additionally, although opioid prescriptions have been trending downward, AL ranks second to Arkansas as the top two highest per capita opioid prescriptions in the nation; AL 71.4 prescriptions per capita vs AR at 71.5 prescriptions per capita Interestingly, Opioid prescribing rates among the Medicaid population suggests that AL is lower than the national average by almost 1 percentage point (AL at 1.82% vs the nation at 2.81%). Regardless, both support a need for this curriculum.

Certain parts of the curriculum highlight difficulties that underrepresented groups have experienced with the SUD crisis, such as barriers to treatment for SUD for example, in hopes of helping to prevent this in our future health professional generations. The lectures were also built to be interactive to ensure an engaging experience. Each lecture is evidence-based and underwent a thorough review by an internist, a legal and policy medical expert, a subject matter expert, and a health informatics and health education expert. Each lecture also has a knowledge-based pre-test and post-test, that includes collecting data on learner demographics.

This presentation will report on module metrics across the ALAHOPE platform. The metrics include pre-and post-test progress as well as participant perspectives relative to prescribing behaviour change.