School Named Center of Excellence for Drug Abuse Education

The UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences has been named a Center of Excellence for Drug Abuse Education by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

UND is one of the first four such centers established by NIDA to serve as national models to support the advancement of addiction awareness, prevention and treatment in primary care practices targeting medical students and resident physicians in primary care specialties such as internal medicine, family practice and pediatrics.

Through the center, the UND medical school’s Office of Medical Education will identify what medical students and residents should learn about substance abuse and develop curriculum that will help them identify, assess and refer patients with drug addictions. 

“Our patient-centered learning curriculum allows us to integrate substance abuse into what the students learn,” said Charles Christianson, M.D., associate professor of family and community medicine, who heads the project for the UND medical school.  “We can add drug addiction to cases the students study each week and bring in standardized patients who play the part of someone with a substance abuse problem.” 

UND’s Center of Excellence will focus on substance abuse that is prevalent in rural and tribal areas such as methamphetamine, inhalants and misuse of prescription drugs, said Christianson.

NIDA, a division of the National Institutes of Health, also funded centers of excellence at Creighton University School of Medicine, Omaha, Nebraska; the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in collaboration with Drexel University College of Medicine; and the Massachusetts Consortium of Medical Schools, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. 

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