Room: Nautical Wheeler
Speaker(s):
Rachel Winograd, PhD
Kanila Brown, MA
Presentation: Bridging substance use related research with clinical practice is essential to improving outcomes, ensuring equitable care, and translating evidence into real-world interventions that reduce overdose risk and promote recovery. By integrating research on contextual insights from affected communities, stigma, and implementation science, clinicians and researchers can develop approaches that are both compassionate and evidence-based, advancing the collective goal of reducing harm and improving quality of life for people who use drugs. There are many ways to study drug use, addiction, and the services designed to address them. In this presentation, Dr. Rachel Winograd, Director of the Addiction Science team and the Addiction, Science, Practice, Implementation, Research and Education (ASPIRE) Lab at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and four ASPIRE Lab graduate students, will discuss the current landscape of Missouri’s overdose crisis and how they are applying various research methodologies to better understand and improve substance use services. Specifically, they will demonstrate the critical roles of working with medical examiner death data and neighborhood deprivation indices, the value of forming and working closely with a Community Advisory Board to enrich both research and clinical practice, the need to measure and mitigate stigma toward people who use drugs and toward the interventions designed to serve them, and the application of implementation science to improve the adoption and delivery of effective substance use services.
Objectives:
- Describe recent changes to Missouri’s overdose death trends by region, demographic group, and substance type
- Discuss the importance of assessing demographic and structural risk factors in individuals substance use outcomes
- Describe how community advisory boards (CABs) of people with lived experience with drugs may help to enhance substance use research and community-informed practice
- Recognize the importance of measuring stigma surrounding people who use drugs and associated interventions to better understand its nature, impact, and potential leverage points
- Define implementation science and describe its primary goals in bridging the gap between substance use service research and practice
Slides and Handouts: