Boston Medical Center Practitioners Develop Addiction Toolkit for Nurses

Practitioners at Boston Medical Center’s Office-Based Addiction Treatment (OBAT) Training and Technical Assistance program have published a comprehensive toolkit outlining the framework and clinical skills needed to educate, train, and evaluate nurses in the addiction treatment space.

The tookit, titled “Addiction Nursing Competencies,” was published in the Journal of Nursing Administration. Its development was led by Kristin F. Watson, MSN, NP-C, CARN and Colleen T. LaBelle, MSN, RN-BC, CARN, along with other staff members at Boston Medical Center.

A 2019 Pew study found that only about half of clinicians who are waivered to prescribe buprenorphine do so in practice, and Boston Medical Center noted in its release that separate research has found about 50% of nursing schools in the US include SUD education in their curriculums.

“Nurses are a diverse group of frontline workers who are often the first healthcare provider that a person with SUD encounters when they present for care,” Watson said in a release announcing the toolkit. “Unfortunately, there continues to be a lack of addiction education within many nursing programs, leaving many nurses unprepared to appropriately screen and care for persons with SUDs. That is what motivated our team to develop this toolkit to support both individual nurses as well as nursing managerial teams in their efforts to build and evaluate nursing addiction care.”

The toolkit implements a holistic approach to care with a focus on patients’ strengths, motivation and personal definition of recovery. When paired with medication-assisted treatment, the competencies outlined in the guidance are designed to enable nurses to deliver care to individuals across the spectrum of addiction, from active use to long-term recovery.

Boston Medical Center’s OBAT program is integrated within the center’s primary care health system. Engaging patients in SUD treatment has been shown to improve other conditions as well, Watson said.

“By engaging persons with SUD into care and providing education about harm reduction,” Watson explained, “we could also expect improvement in commonly co-morbid health conditions, such as HIV, hepatitis C, skin and soft tissue infections, and improvement in chronic health conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes, and respiratory illnesses.”