Substance Use and Pain Curriculum Innovation: Establishing a Student-Faculty Partnership for Curricular Change

The opioid overdose crisis had progressed broadly in the United States, with a 21% increase from 2016 to 2017, and specifically in Massachusetts, with a peak rate of 1,374 deaths in 2016. In 2016, students and faculty at Harvard Medical School (HMS) established the Substance Use and Pain Curriculum Committee (SUPCC) to expand substance use and pain education. However, faculty capacity, financial resources, and administrative support were insufficient to implement changes across all phases of the medical school curriculum.

The HMS SUPCC restructured in 2021 to put students at the forefront of curricular development. This restructuring was done through 3 main innovations: (1) establishment of a student-centered committee structure, ensuring that curricular changes are centered on student interests and needs; (2) student-led curricular development and implementation, reducing faculty workload; and (3) focus on clinically relevant teaching and opportunities to practice learned skill sets.

This student-centered structure facilitated the expansion of the addiction and pain medicine curriculum to more than 30 hours of teaching by 2024. Examples of student-driven initiatives include development of an opioid use disorder management practicum equivalent to the Drug Enforcement Agency X-waiver, increased medical student access to naloxone through a hospital partnership, and integration of case-based opioid use disorder and pain medicine didactics into the clerkship year.

Although this work has established a longitudinal curriculum across all medical training stages, more must be done in clerkship rotations to help students apply their substance use and pain education in the clinical setting. The HMS SUPCC is working to incorporate teaching on nonopioid substances, such as alcohol, cannabis, and ketamine; provide longitudinal clinical experiences so students learn to care for patients with substance use disorder and chronic pain from short-term intervention to long-term recovery; and develop surveys to quantitatively and qualitatively measure curriculum outcomes.