Podiatry Residents on an Inpatient Addiction Consult Service

Podiatry residents may benefit from addiction medicine rotations due to substantial overlap between podiatric needs and substance use disorders (SUDs), particularly in the hospital setting. In a semi-structured format, we describe the cases of two podiatry residents, perhaps the first ever documented, who rotated with an inpatient addiction medicine consult team at an urban, academic hospital. These two residents joined the addiction consult team in 2023 and 2024 and rated their confidence in twelve learning objectives via a five-point Likert scale before and after the rotation (2 weeks long). They also rated their attitude toward the value of addiction services. Post-rotation feedback from the module and ad hoc e-mail correspondence are included. Residents 1 and 2 joined the team and engaged well in orientating with the team, eventually providing near-independent addiction medicine consultations for primary inpatient teams. Pre/post data showed large increases in confidence in learning objectives (mean scores 2.1 to 4.9 for Resident 1, and mean scores 1.5 to 4.0 for Resident 2). They both reported positive experiences, and months later reflected on both pragmatic (e.g., available resources) and attitude-related (e.g., understanding the importance of substance use context for patients) educational gains. In summary, residents from surgical specialties like podiatry may benefit from inpatient addiction medicine exposure. It is unclear whether their rotation spots could be better utilized by those in other specialties, but SUDs are prevalent in a multitude of settings, arguing for broad dissemination of SUD treatment education.