Gaps and Recommendations for Canadian Continuing Professional Development Pain Management and Substance Use Disorder Programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Context: Opioid overdoses and surging death rates are a national public health crisis for Canada. All physicians have a key role to play in curbing the opioid epidemic and this begins with education. Formal medical education for pain management and substance use disorder is not often taught as its own unit, rather it is integrated in fragments across multiple medical courses and clinical rotations. For Canadian physicians, there can be considerable variance in the topics and number of hours of training received in these areas. These variances in education, and the ongoing opioid crisis, make continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities important. Objective: To identify pain management and substance use disorder training needs for Canadian physicians. Study Design and Analysis: This qualitative study, using open-ended survey questions and interviews, identified CPD pain management and substance use disorder programs currently available, the key competencies physicians need in these topic areas, and gaps in existing educational offerings. Surveys were conducted online and by telephone. Interviews were conducted virtually and transcribed verbatim. All qualitative data was thematically analyzed using open coding. Setting and Population Studied: Representatives from 11 CPD offices at Canadian medical schools participated in the survey. Interviews were conducted with 14 Canadian pain management and substance use experts, and with representatives from national medical associations. Outcome Measures/Results: Key strengths of existing CPD pain programs included interactions with other learners, the inclusion of up-to-date, evidence-informed content, and adaptation to learner needs. Gaps of current programs included a lack of patient experiences, interactivity, knowledge application, and interdisciplinary offerings. Recommendations for future CPD programming include collaborative, interprofessional engagement, context-specific scenarios/case studies for training purposes, interactive engagement of learners, application of knowledge to clinical practice, pre- and post- program resources, and program evaluation. Conclusions: It is evident from this study that there is a need for pain management and substance use disorder CPD courses that compliment and build on existing programs. The AFMC’s bilingual CPD Pain Management and Substance Use Disorder Curriculum is currently being piloted with physicians across Canada’s 17 medical schools.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.032 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".