Substance Abuse Education for Medical Students

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The widespread adverse social, medical and personal consequences of substance abuse are well documented, and physicians are a key resource in the network of education, prevention and treatment that exists to deal with this problem. Physicians play an essential role in the early recognition and treatment of substance abuse and they are crucial for providing leadership in educating the public that addiction is primarily a medical problem - a substance-induced disease of the brain. It is essential that all physicians have the best available education possible about substance abuse. To address this problem, we plan to construct a unique state of the art internet-based educational program on substance abuse that will be available to all medical students in the USA. In collaboration with leading national experts in the field, tutorials covering the neurobiology, pathogenesis, epidemiology, diagnosis, clinical course, psychology and treatment of substance abuse for each of the 4 years of medical school are being constructed. Each tutorial utilizes text, tables, figures, animations, movies, a popup glossary and links for additional reading. A central feature of each tutorial is the use of interactive animations and questions that produce immediate feedback to the student regarding their performance. This involves them in active learning and simultaneously assesses their performance. An initial Yale Medical School server based program has been constructed which allows easy modification and updating of each tutorial by faculty and provides data on the students' performance. This program will be revised and extended to serve a large number of users, allow multiple types of questions, be useable with "Blackboard", be compatible with the Shared Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), and respond to the Americans with Disability Act. The ability of the program to provide data on each student's performance before, during and after each tutorial will allow for evidence-based improvements to be made in the tutorials over time, and will allow documentation of the amount of knowledge and understanding of substance abuse for medical students across the nation. The computer program will be made available to other medical schools to allow for local modifications and improvements. By providing effective modern substance abuse education for medical schools we will accomplish a major step toward improving the role of physicians in dealing this serious national problem.