Opioid Use Disorder Planning Grant for Rural Utah

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OMEID VADIPOUR
OMEID VADIPOUR

Introduction:
Opioid use disorder is highly prevalent in the United States, and there are not enough providers licensed to provide medication-assisted-treatment. Providers cite different barriers for this lack of licensure, but a formal study has not been conducted in rural Utah to determine those barriers.
Methods:
A survey was distributed to providers in rural Utah, allowing them to report what barriers they believe stand in the way of more providers becoming licensed to become certified to provide medication-assisted-treatment. These results were to be used to create a guide to help providers overcome those barriers.
Results:
No responses to the survey were received.
Discussion:
We expect that the lack of responses was largely in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has likely increased provider patient loads, and subsequently increased provider burnout rates.
In addition, our survey was distributed using Gmail in the form of a Word document, which may have increased the effort that providers would have to exert in order to complete and return the survey.
Using Gmail may also have sent surveys directly to spam or junk folders, so that they were not seen by all providers.
We also believe that the length of our survey may have contributed to the lack of responses. Using free-text responses could have dissuaded providers from downloading, filling out, and returning surveys.



Recommend0 recommendationsPublished in College of Pharmacy, Virtual Poster Session Spring 2021

Responses

  1. Really liked your verbal overview of your project. As we talked about before, sometime failures are important learning experiences. What advice would you give to another student who was going to do a similar project in the future?

    1. I would definitely advise students pursuing a similar project to try different avenues of sending their survey. This could include email services that are more built to handle bulk emails, using services such as Qualtrics for the survey, and sending to a small population first to ensure that they are able to receive the survey.

  2. Having grown up in a rural setting, this is a subject that needs addressing. A follow-up after the pandemic is over appears needed.

    1. I agree, I think that this would be a great project to pursue further in the future once we are past the pandemic!

  3. Omeid, am so sorry that you received no replies. It seems like you did develop an understanding of how to hopefully increase returns on future projects, although the pandemic is the pandemic, and maybe there was no way for you to do anything to ease the burdens of the providers to allow for them to complete the survey. Hopefully, we’ll get back to “normal” and the workloads and burnout will diminish!

  4. Thank you for sharing this interesting topic. Sorry that you did not get any responses. Patient education on appropriate use is so critical here.

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