Addiction Medicine Fellowship - The purpose of this UCLA-CDU-Eisenhower Addiction Medicine Fellowship proposal is to improve the ability of addiction medicine fellows to practice primary and secondary prevention and management of opioid use disorder (OUD) in adolescents and adults living in high-need communities. Underlying this proposal is the perspective that substance use disorder is a chronic disease and not a moral failing. The Life Course Health Development approach comes from the field of chronic disease epidemiology in public health and is a useful framework to understand the evolution of chronic diseases across the lifespan (Halfon & Hochstein, 2002; Kuh & Ben-Shlomo, 2004). Our proposal takes this theory and operationalizes it not only for the clinical practice of addiction medicine but also for medical education. With this project, we propose to enhance the fellowship curriculum by incorporating the following content objectives: 1. Leadership skills for addiction medicine specialists to support primary care teams that include primary care medicine physicians, mental health professionals, pharmacists, physician extenders such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants, and other interprofessional members 2. Knowledge and skills to use telehealth effectively as a method to deliver care to patients in rural settings 3. Exposure to rural health experiences that can provide care to populations experiencing difficulty accessing health care 4. Understanding of the Chronic Care Model and how addiction and other chronic conditions are intertwined 5. Understanding of the risk factors such as adverse childhood experiences and trauma that can contribute to the development of an addiction disorder This proposal builds upon the Southern California Addiction Medicine Consortium, which was established by the last HRSA AMF proposal from 2020-2025 to allow addiction medicine specialists in our area to network and share their expertise. The Consortium is led by Dr. Chelsea Shover, an addiction health services researcher, who facilitates a series of ongoing meetings featuring presentations by leading addiction medicine professionals in our region. With this Consortium, we were able to fund an expansion of the family medicine-based addiction medicine fellowship program at UCLA and establish an addiction medicine fellowship program at Eisenhower Health Medical Center, a rural setting 130 miles from UCLA in the Coachella Valley in the Inland Empire. From 2020 to 2025, we have trained 25 addiction medicine specialists. For this proposal, we plan to expand the Eisenhower program to include a track at UCLA and expand a recently-established addiction medicine fellowship program at Charles R. Drew University (CDU) in South Los Angeles. We are asking for funding for five fellows per year for five years, for a total of 25 addiction medicine specialists who will be trained with this project. With this proposal, we will expand Eisenhower’s program by adding two additional trainees, funding a total of four per year, and expand CDU's fellowship program by adding a second trainee. In addition to funding addiction medicine fellowship training, we will also support the addiction medicine training needs of four internal medicine residency programs at UCLA, CDU, Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital (MLKCH) in South Los Angeles, and Eisenhower; and one medicine-pediatrics residency program at UCLA. With the requirement to provide clinical training in addiction medicine to internal medicine residents that went into effect on July 1, 2022, these internal medicine programs have reached out to the Consortium for training support. Therefore, we would be supporting the training of an additional 189 internal medicine residents and 24 medicine-pediatrics residents from UCLA, 15 internal medicine residents at MLKCH, 24 internal medicine residents at CDU, and 54 internal medicine residents at Eisenhower, for a total of 306 additional resident trainees that would be taught by th
