The Authors’ Own Words: A Call for Training Graduate Medical Students on Harm Reduction for People Who Inject Drugs

In this letter to the editor, authors share that there is a lack of standardized education on topic of harm reduction for graduate medical students. In order to fill this curricular gap, we delivered a two-hour pilot training introducing local community harm reduction organizations and harm reduction ideology and strategies for people who inject drugs to graduate medical students at Boston University.

Raagini Jawa, MD, MPH; Nivetha Saravanan, BA; Shana A. B. Burrowes, MPH, PhD; and Lindsay Demers, PhD share with SAj, “due to the ongoing opioid epidemic, the prevalence of people who inject drugs (PWID) continues to increase, and it is critical for medical trainees and providers to be exposed to, and familiar with, community harm reduction resources and strategies, which are often siloed outside of medical curricula. Even though nearly three-fourths of our respondents had prior classroom didactics on substance use disorders, our stand-alone introductory training was effective in increasing graduate medical students comfort and knowledge of harm reduction ideology, safer injection techniques, and naloxone administration- all practical risk mitigation tools they can utilize later in their clinical careers. Our findings serve as an example that introducing harm reduction education early within medical training ought to be explored and inclusion of community harm reduction organizations during trainings may serve as a future model to facilitate integrated care delivery for PWID.”

You can read this letter now in SAj Volume 42, Issue 3 or online.