An Evaluation of STFM's National Addiction Curriculum

Family physicians are well positioned to treat patients with substance use disorders (SUDs), expand access to care, destigmatize addiction, and provide a biopsychosocial treatment approach. There is a great need to train residents and faculty to competency in SUD treatment. Through the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) Addiction Collaborative, we created and evaluated the first national family medicine (FM) addiction curriculum using evidence-based content and teaching principles.

After launching the curriculum with 25 FM residency programs, we collected formative feedback through monthly faculty development sessions and summative feedback through 8 focus groups with 33 faculty members and 21 residents. We used qualitative thematic analysis to assess the value of the curriculum.

The curriculum enriched resident and faculty knowledge across all SUD topics. It changed their attitudes in viewing addiction as a chronic disease within the scope of FM practice, increased confidence, and decreased stigma. It nurtured behavior change, enhancing communication and assessment skills and encouraging collaboration across disciplines. Participants valued the flipped-classroom approach, videos, cases, role plays, ready-made teacher's guides, and one-page summaries. Having protected time to complete the modules and temporally coupling the modules with the live, faculty-led sessions enhanced learning.

The curriculum provides a comprehensive, ready-made, evidenced-based platform for training residents and faculty in SUDs. It can be implemented by faculty with all levels of prior expertise, cotaught by physicians and behavioral health providers, tailored to each program's didactic schedule, and modified based on the local culture and resource availability.