Pain, Opioids, and Worker Wellness: A Clinician Training

Pain, Opioids, and Worker Wellness is a free, live, CME-accredited virtual training for clinicians hosted by the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine in partnership with the Yale Occupational & Environmental Medicine Program.

Acute and chronic pain are common in the workplace and result in lost productivity which can be impacted by long-term opioid prescriptions and opioid use disorder. Clinicians who treat injured workers can benefit from targeted training that will help hone their skills to identify and treat such individuals with a goal toward proper clinical care for acute pain, prevention of and care for chronic pain, improved functional status and return to work.

Who should attend this training?

This training is designed for clinicians based in the United States who care for injured workers navigating the return to work process and who may provide care for acute or chronic pain as well as opioid use.

What will participants do?

Participants will complete 60 minutes of pre-training self-directed learning followed by five hours of live, interactive, modularized training combining didactic and collaborative, activity-based learning.

What will be covered?

By the end of this training, participants will:

1. Define the phases of return-to-work, apply processes for evaluating work ability, and identify the role of the clinician in facilitating return to work.
2. Practice taking a focused pain history, apply a patient-centered approach to assessing your patient's goals for pain management, and evaluate risks and benefits of prescribing opioids for acute pain.
3. Practice taking an expanded pain history using a biopsychosocial framework and apply non-pharmacologic, pharmacologic and combined treatment options for chronic pain.
4. Compare and contrast signs and symptoms of opioid withdrawal and opioid use disorder and develop a patient-centered treatment plan taking into account medication-based treatment options and best practices for optimizing patient safety and reducing harm.

Meet Your Facilitators

• Jaylyn Clark Shifrin, PhD, Clinical Psychologist, Wellstar Health System
• Richard Smith, MD, Instructor, Internal Medicine, Yale School of Medicine
• Kenneth Morford, MD, Assistant Professor, Internal Medicine, Yale School of Medicine
• Sara Edmond, PhD, Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine
• Efia James, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Occupational & Environmental Medicine, Yale School of Medicine
• Jeanette Tetrault, MD, Professor, Internal Medicine and Chronic Disease Epidemiology, Yale Schools of Medicine and Public Health

Accreditation Details

Physician attendees are eligible for up to 4 AMA PRA Category 1 Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits and APP attendees (e.g. PA, APRN, and NP participants) will receive documentation of participation that may be submitted by the participant to the appropriate accrediting body.

This training event is made possible by an unrestricted educational gift from The Hartford.