Safina Adatia, a resident at the Herzl and member of our Department, presented a poster at the National Conference of the Association for Medical Education and Research in Substance Abuse (AMERSA) in Boston on her work building a referral corridor for patients suffering from opioid use disorder. She has recently matched to Boston University - BMC (Boston Medical Centre) for addiction medicine and will be starting next July.
Congratulations Safina!
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Here is Safina's poster summary:
The opioid crisis poses ongoing challenges for communities and medical professionals. One challenge is that emergency departments (EDs) are a frequent first point of contact for many individuals suffering from opioid use disorders. However, EDs are not well suited to ensure ongoing care for this population. The standard of care now highlights the importance of dedicated follow-up in a substance use disorder clinic. Importantly, having a standardized referral process in place has been shown to be critical for ED physicians to successfully refer patients. In our hospital we have a large ED with a neighbouring addiction clinic, however, there is no standard referral process in place.
In conjunction with ED physicians, our goal was to establish a referral protocol for patients presenting to the ED with opioid use disorders. The implementation of an emergency department referral protocol resulted in a substantial increase of referrals (1.67x) for patients with opioid use disorder to the Herzl Addiction Medicine Clinic. This initiative represents a low-cost intervention that meaningfully improves the quality of care for these patients by ensuring they have access to appropriate community follow-up.