Educating Together, Improving Together: Harmonizing Interprofessional Approaches to Address the Opioid Epidemic

The United States is in the midst of an urgent and complex opioid crisis. To address how education and training can more effectively respond to this crisis, we must have a better understanding of problems in practice?or professional practice gaps?for health professionals and teams in practice. A coordinated response requires identifying and addressing professional practice gaps (PPGs) related to pain management, opioid use disorder, and other substance use disorder (SUD) care, as well as integrating evidence-based best practices into health professional education and training curricula across the continuum from undergraduate training into post-graduate continuing education This Special Publication presents two information-gathering efforts to assess persisting PPGs pertaining to pain management and SUD care and to better understand the current health professional education environment: the first is a comprehensive literature review, and the second is a survey of the regulatory landscape.