The Addiction Training for Health Professionals (ATHP) program, contributes to the creation of courses, curricula, and training programs for physicians and their teams to prevent and treat substance use disorders. With courses directly addressing substance use and mental health, and with substance use information threaded through all courses, the ATHP program has been shown to increase knowledge and decrease stigma around substance use issues so that physicians and their teams across specialties can competently prevent and treat substance use disorders.
Public Health curricula are also a requirement for specializing in preventive medicine, which has a sub-specialty in addiction treatment. The graduate-level public health training, therefore, is a stepping stone to residency programs in prevention, while the substance use and mental health-specific course materials can support psychiatry residency programs whose trainees can also sub-specialize in the treatment of substance use disorders and addiction medicine, and primary care providers.
The World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), North Atlantic Treaty Organization Science for Peace and Security Programme (NATO), Harvard, and Stanford have all collaborated with and provided financial support for this free model of healthcare education (CDC and WHO alone sponsoring 15 courses ongoing).
The NextGenU.org learning platform, which hosts the ATHP courses, has been successfully tested in North America, Kenya, and India, in the medical field, with community health workers and primary care physicians. Our studies have shown identical knowledge and competency gains and greater student satisfaction when compared with conventional learning models.
The courses offered range from undergraduate and community health worker training through graduate medical and public health education, and include a local or global peer community, along with skills-oriented mentorships.
Melissa Dassrath
Author
