The Impact of an Opioid Use Disorder Immersive Education Experience on Preprofessional Health Care Students’ Development of Hope and Hopeful Communication (Dissertation)

Currently, the prescription opioid and heroin overdose epidemic is the worst public health crisis in Pennsylvania and addiction problems within the Lehigh Valley far outpace the number of health professionals trained to provide care in the field of Addiction Medicine. Additionally, negative attitudes towards individuals with substance use disorder are prevalent among health care providers. Unfortunately, this trend may continue as preprofessional health care curricula across many disciplines still lack the social, emotional, and behavioral competencies to treat patients with substance use disorder. Lehigh Valley Health Network has been an integral community-based partner in addressing the multi-faceted disease of Opioid Use Disorder and, as such, has developed a preprofessional health care student educational program aimed at reducing stigma and cultivating hope. The immersive education experience is an integrated simulation within an existing educational curriculum which provides a comprehensive, authentic context for learning, coupled with guidance from expert modeling. The study was conducted in a mixed-methods research design to investigate the impact of an immersive education experience on participants’ hope levels and use of hopeful communication. Participants (N = 100) from two vocational-technical schools from the Lehigh Valley participated in the study. Initial core data collection occurred at two points in time: pre- and post- the immersive education experience (N = 61) and pre- and post- the education-only (N = 39). The self-reported data was collected from a digital web-based survey and included two single item Likert scale questions and one response question. A purposive sampling technique was used to select participants for the supplemental component which occurred thirty days post with the immersive education experience (N = 11) and the education-only (N = 8) groups. A repeat post survey was administered, and focus groups were conducted. The quantitative and qualitative results indicated that after an immersive education experience, participants reported positive hope levels congruent with their use of relationship and hope based inspirational messaging and demonstrated an increased utilization of normalizing messages, a destigmatizing technique founded in counseling literature. A notable finding was the education-only component, when delivered in isolation of the immersive education experience, increased participants’ fear and perceived susceptibility and may have contributed to the stigmatizing language it was designed to prevent

Profile of registrars and reasons for specialisation

Introduction The shortage of general practitioners is a worldwide phenomenon and occurs in countries such as Canada, the United States of America and Saudi Arabia. Increasingly fewer students are interested in general practice as an occupation. Choosing a speciality is a complex process and is dependent on a wide range of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, including preference at the start of studies, experience during undergraduate training, and environmental factors such as cultural and socio-economic background. The aim of this study was to determine the profile of registrars at the Faculty of Health Sciences (University of the Free State), as well as their reasons for specialisation.MethodAll departments were contacted and the first author circulated questionnaires and informed consent forms during the academic afternoons. Questionnaires and informed consent forms were available in Afrikaans and English.ResultsOf the 150 questionnaires handed out, 109 were used for analysis (122 were received, of which 13 were incomplete). Most of the respondents were Afrikaans speaking (81.7%), male (68.8%), with a median age of 31 years (range 26 to 50 years), and married (67.6%). Only 13.8% of the respondents' fathers were medical doctors, 54.5% of which were general practitioners. Few respondents (13.8%) had needed to repeat any of their undergraduate studies, while 23.9% had received academic prizes. Most (91.7%) had completed family medicine during rotation in undergraduate training. The main specialisation areas were internal medicine, obstetrics and gynaecology, and radiology. Many respondents (76.9%) had worked in general practice or primary care for a median of two years (range 0.25 to 18 years). The main reasons for leaving primary care were overwork, wanting to function at a higher level, and that they saw no pathologies. Half of the respondents (49.9%) had never considered private practice as an occupation and the main reasons given were type of work and patient, no future for general practitioners, legislation, and inconvenient hours.ConclusionThis study provides some indicators as to why fewer doctors are willing to work as general practitioners or primaryhealthcare physicians. An excessive workload in the primary healthcare setting was indicated by 31.3% of the respondents as the major reason why they chose not to stay.For full text, click here:SA Fam Pract 2006;48(4):15-15