The MGH Institute is among just 19 colleges in the country that are participating in a federal initiative to dramatically increase the number of nurses and physician assistants who can treat patients with substance abuse disorders. 

Through a grant funded by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, School of Nursing faculty Susan Stevens and Jason Lucey are partnering with Chris Shaw and Dawn Williamson from Massachusetts General Hospital’s Addiction Consult Team to implement a program that expands on the federal 2016 Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. When NP and PA students graduate this spring, they will be among the first new practitioners who will be eligible to immediately receive a waiver to prescribe medication-assisted treatment and overdose-reversal medications such as the opioid-blocker buprenorphine. 

According to Dr. Stevens, the grant’s principal investigator, as many as 450 new graduates have received an additional 24 hours of training over the past three years. “There’s a major demand for more substance abuse providers because the opioid epidemic is not letting up,” said Stevens, noting that Massachusetts continues to have the highest rates of opioid deaths in the country. “This is a way to substantially expand the number of practitioners who can treat people with substance use disorders.” 

The grant, “Partnering in Recovery,” follows the work done by Associate Professor Lisa Walker, director of the physician assistant studies program, who was on Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s Medical Education Working Group on Prescription Drug Misuse. Over the past two years, the state’s PA programs collaborated with the Department of Public Health to develop curriculum core competencies for PA students. The results of the effort were recently published in The Journal of Physician Assistant Education. “It was gratifying that all of the state’s PA programs came together to develop these guidelines,” Walker said. “We hope that our work can be used as a model in other states.”