MI CARES Expansion - The overarching goal of the MI CARES Expansion program is to provide robust education on the clinical, social, and basic sciences underlying substance use disorders (SUDs). This project will support broad-based addiction medicine education implementation, including clinical experiences at Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Alabama (UAB). Educating and training medical students to treat persons with SUDs is a national priority. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services declared an ongoing public health emergency (PHE) precisely because of the opioid crisis. Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) predicted 110,640 overdose deaths in the US in 2023. We propose establishing the MI CARES program to meet this need, which will train medical students at MSU and UAB. Our collaboration across multiple medical schools will take the current educational program from an elective at MSU to required curricula at MSU and UAB. MSU is a land-grant institution whose purpose is to serve those in Michigan. With eight community campuses, including in urban and rural areas, the school aims to train primary care providers who will serve Michigan and underserved communities. While an urban school, UAB trains physicians who serve throughout Alabama, with many practicing in medically underserved and rural areas, particularly in primary care. The populations served by this grant are medical students and, in turn, the populations in these areas. UAB and MSU serve 50-70% rural and medically underserved communities. The curriculum of the MI CARES program is designed to provide comprehensive training to medical students in treating persons with SUDs. It includes asynchronous modules, synchronous didactics in large and small group settings, and clinical experiential days. All these components are grounded in an anti-stigma framework, emphasizing the importance of treating persons with SUDs with kindness, compassion, and evidence-based practices. This training will equip the next generation of physicians with the skills to meet the nation's biomedical, behavioral, and clinical needs treating people with SUDs and promote a physician pipeline poised to lead SUD healthcare. The overarching goal of MI CARES medical student education is to provide support to expand and implement the MI CARES curriculum to increase student knowledge of evidence-based addiction practices and reduce negative attitudes towards persons with SUD. We will implement the required curricula at MSU and UAB to obtain this goal. The second goal is to identify curricular needs at each school to assess gaps in current offerings, including where MI CARES didactic materials can support medical student education. We will obtain this information by performing a gap analysis at each school. This analysis will be followed by an implementation goal where we will support MSU and UAB in the implementation of a complete addiction medicine curriculum that covers the required elements of the grant, board examination expectations, and best practices to train students to be champions for the care of persons with a SUD. Over each grant year, we will train at least 200 medical students across two institutions, with students who will ultimately practice in numerous states. We will monitor the curriculum through a student attitude survey, the modified substance abuse attitudes survey (mSAAS), student knowledge assessments, and student surveys of clinical experiences, with our measurable outcomes of sustained knowledge and attitude changes over time relating to SUD and substance use treatment.
