Substance Misuse in the Undergraduate Medical Curriculum
Project start date: Oct 2013
Summary
The Substance Misuse in the Undergraduate Medical Curriculum Project, funded by the Department of Health and run by St George’s Medical School, University of London, developed guidance and resources on integrating substance misuse into the undergraduate medical curriculum. As part of the project’s third phase, the SSA funded the updating of the project’s factsheets that were produced to cover the most common presentations in the most common settings in a user friendly format.
Aims
Substance misuse is so common in medical presentations that it is likely to be a factor in some patients in almost all medical specialities. Substance misuse affects all ages, genders, ethnic groups, social classes and geographical locations. Every doctor, wherever he or she works, will have patients whose obvious or obscure symptomatology may be associated with the misuse of licit and illicit substances.
The Substance Misuse in the Undergraduate Medical Curriculum Project, a Department of Health funded project run by St George’s Medical School,University of London, developed guidance and resources on integrating substance misuse into the undergraduate medical curriculum. The resources included a set of Fast Factsheets that covered substance misuse across medical disciplines. These factsheets were well received, but they eventually needed an update.
Funding to further develop and update the factsheets was awarded by the SSA.
Our aim, therefore, has been to produce factsheets with accompanying slides which cover the most common presentations in the most common settings in a user friendly format. In this way it is hoped that this set of factsheets and slides will provide a rapid overview which is useful for medical students and health care practitioners at the frontline.
Results
Research articles (open access):
- Janine Carroll, Christine Goodair, Andrew Chaytor, Caitlin Notley Hamid Ghodse and Peter Kopelman Substance misuse teaching in undergraduate medical education BMC Medical Education 2014, 14:34
- Goodair C and Crome I (2014) Improving the Landscape of Substance Misuse Teaching in Undergraduate Medical Education in English Medical Schools from Concept to Implementation. Canadian Journal of Addiction, 5 (3) pp5-10 Special Education Issue