Training needs, access to and contextual factors of addiction education in Europe: Towards a research agenda

Drug and alcohol addiction cause a significant social and economic burden globally. Adequate diagnosis and treatment by general practitioners fails, in part due to a lack of knowledge and accredited training in addiction medicine. In Ireland, the training of general practitioners in identifying and treating addiction is lacking. Internationally, a number of initiatives to address this challenge have emerged. This study improves addiction education for doctors and allied health professionals and responds directly to the European Research Agency’s priorities “Excellent Science, Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing”, specifically “improve ability to monitor health and to prevent, detect, treat and manage disease”. To build on these initiatives, the goal of this project is to establish the feasibility and acceptability of training primary care practitioners in addiction medicine, and, in particular, how international models of addiction medicine training might inform the future development of general practice education in Ireland. Specifically, the ongoing study seeks to increase incorporation of new understandings about addictive disorders from multiple disciplines into undergraduate and postgraduate medical curricula. The three years of the project have yielded an array of scientific outputs, including a dozen peer-reviewed studies describing the project’s impacts. These publications indicate that addiction medicine education provides a range of benefits to the clinicians and the greater community, including increased knowledge of identification and treatment of substance use disorders as well as increased professional competency in addiction medicine. Studies were independently peer-reviewed and published in top scientific periodicals, including the Academic Medicine, and Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment.