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Face-to-face workshops in Victoria will help GPs gain MATOD accreditation and build confidence in opioid dependence treatment.
Opioid dependency has increased in Australia, with skilled prescribers required to help address the issue.
A trio of Victoria-based workshops to help GPs become Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Dependence (MATOD) accredited will be held over the coming months.
The events, to be held across Melbourne, are designed to provide hands-on learning, at a time when skilled prescribers are ‘urgently needed’ to combat Australia’s growing opioid crisis.
Dr Anne Saunders, immediate past Chair of the RACGP Victoria Alcohol and Other Drug Committee, will facilitate two of the events and said MATOD is a ‘really safe and helpful way’ GPs can help their dependent patients.
‘The impact of drug use on our communities is deep and very costly,’ she said.
‘It’s costly in terms of productivity, it’s costly in terms of trauma and fragmentation of families because it’s not only the person who’s using drugs who experiences trauma.
‘It’s very easy to think that “substance disorder doesn’t affect me, doesn’t affect my family, doesn’t affect my community”, but the reality is that this is a hidden illness that affects so many of the people that we treat every day.
‘If you offer people opiate replacement therapy, you actually bring stabilisation into people’s lives – there is a great response to this therapy in terms of discontinuation or reduction of ongoing illicit drug use.’
The workshops aim to help participants:
identify opioid toxicity in a patient requesting a prescription for opioids
recognise opioid withdrawal in a patient requesting a prescription for opioids
decide when opioid use disorder is present in a patient requesting a prescription of opioids
compare the formulations of methadone and buprenorphine
understand the Victorian medico-legal context to be able to manage patients with opioid use disorder
provide appropriate overdose management advice.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, there were 57,740 people receiving pharmacotherapy treatment for opioid dependence last year, a 24% rise since 2011.
But Dr Saunders said broarder and systemic shifts are needed within healthcare to better support GPs in offering effective addiction treatment.
‘This training takes time and I have never done one of these consults that hasn’t taken me at least half an hour,’ she said.
‘The policy settings of general practice are such that short consults are actually remunerated at a much higher rate per minute than long consults.
‘Which means for any GP to lean into this work, which generally requires an investment of at least a couple of months to a year of long appointments with your patients, we don’t want them to be financially disincentivised to do this work.’
The workshops will take place in Melton on 31 October, Pakenham on 7 November, and Lilydale on 5 December. For full details and to register, see the RACGP website.
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