Impact of an Opioid Use Disorder Fellowship on MSW Student Knowledge

Background: The opioid epidemic has created a public health emergency, straining resources and requiring knowledgeable behavioral health professionals to meet the unique and complex needs of individuals experiencing opioid use disorders (OUD). Even with overdose related deaths decreasing slightly in recent years, there is a well-documented shortage of services and professionals to meet the needs of this population. Trained social workers are well positioned to fill this service gap. Social work programs are highly variable in exposure to evidence-informed substance use-specific training content and research in the efficacy of such instructional content on student knowledge is limited. This study examines the impact of a year-long training program focused on preparing MSW students to work with individuals experiencing OUD.

Methods: This quasi-experimental study with nonequivalent comparison groups surveyed MSW students enrolled in two MSW fellowship programs. The first is an opioid work force development fellowship focused on evidence-informed interventions for working with individuals experiencing OUDs across the lifespan (OWDF; N=25) served as the intervention group. The second is a behavioral health workforce development fellowship focused on meeting youth behavioral health needs, which served as the control group (BHWDF; N=26). Both fellowships required a competitive application process, enrollment in an identified content-specific semester-long class, participation in a practicum placement working with the identified population, and engagement in monthly seminars structured to adjunct didactic classroom education. Fellowships ran concurrently and no students were enrolled in both fellowships. The Brief Opioid Overdose Knowledge (BOOK) questionnaire was used to assess general opioid knowledge, overdose risk knowledge, and overdose response knowledge and was administered at the beginning and end of the fellowship. If none of the 12 BOOK questions were answered, the responses were treated as missing and participants were excluded from analysis (N=2). If only some of the responses were missing, missing responses were treated as incorrect. ANCOVA was conducted to compare scores between groups.

Results: Students in both groups improved their opioid knowledge during the academic year they were enrolled in either fellowship. Students in the control group on average had lower pretest (m=8.15; SD=2.84) and posttest (m=9.11; SD=2.39) scores when compared to the pretest (m=10.56; SD=1.58) and posttest (m=11.12; SD=0.97) scores for students enrolled in the OWDF. The ANCOVA analysis determined that students in the OWDF had significantly higher posttest scores after accounting for pretest scores (p<0.01).

Conclusions and Implications: This study adds to the literature on substance use disorder content in social work education highlighting the benefit of OUD-specific curricular and experiential learning content on opioid knowledge when compared to a control. Social workers are employed in diverse settings and are the most prevalent behavioral health profession nationwide. Improving knowledge of the unique and complex needs of individuals with OUDs among social work students can contribute to addressing the known service gaps for this population. Understanding training effectiveness to ensure that programs impart evidence-informed skills is essential. Strategies used in this fellowship program have implications for future efforts in population-specific enhanced training to other areas of need and should be explored.