Abstract Background Despite the high prevalence of substance use disorder (SUD) in primary care and hospital settings, few easily deployable interventions exist to address stigma and empathy decline among general internists. Aim To develop and pilot the first patient-centered podcast to improve attitudes toward opioid use disorder (OUD) patients among internal medicine residents and faculty. Setting Academic Medical Center General Internal Medicine department. Participants Sixty participants in needs assessment; 15 participants enrolled in a non-controlled pre-post intervention study. Program Description We developed a novel three-episode podcast series incorporating authentic lived experience with OUD and expert commentary using a collaborative co-creation methodology. Our systematic needs assessment informed deployment of this educational innovation. Program Evaluation Pre-post measures included attitudes (Medical Condition Regard Scale), confidence in OUD competencies, and participant satisfaction. Statistical analysis used Wilcoxon signed-rank and McNemar tests. Results Participants demonstrated statistically significant improvement in attitude ( p = 0.015), confidence with motivational interviewing and offering resources ( p = 0.04). Discussion This innovation suggests podcasts using patient voices can potentially provide attainable and scalable means to improve attitudes while addressing SUD education gaps. Larger studies are needed.
Onyango et al. (Thu,) studied this question.