Digging Deeper: Substance Use Disorder

In this video, Brett Snodgrass, a nurse practitioner, provides the take-home messages from her session "Digging Deeper: Substance Use Disorder” at our Practical Updates in Primary Care 2023 Virtual Series. Ms Snodgrass provides some tips on how to primary care physicians can screen for substance use disorder in their patients and what to do if their results are positive.

Brett Snodgrass, is a family nurse practitioner at Baptist Healthcare System (Memphis, Tennessee).

For more meeting coverage, visit the Practical Updates in Primary Care newsroom.

For more information about PUPC 2023 Virtual Series and to register for upcoming sessions, visit https://www.practicalupdates.consultant360.com/.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Brett Snodgrass: My name is Brett Snodgrass, I'm a family nurse practitioner in Memphis, Tennessee, director of palliative medicine for a large palliative practice in our area. I'd love to share with you a few take home messages from my session. If you didn't get to join I hope you can take some time and join at a later date. But really talking about substance use disorder screening, how to appropriately screen our patients.

I think there's two really important things to know about screening.

Number one, everyone should be screened, and we should be screening for substance use disorder at each visit yearly, right? So when they come in for that annual visit, that is the perfect time to have maybe a sheet that they can mark for you, or you can interview them during that. But that's a really good time to really key in with patients and do a substance use disorder screening.

And then finally what do you do when they screen positive? You need to recognize that new rules and regulations are out there for how we treat opioid use disorder, but then also what are your referral options available? So it's really important to not only screen, but then what do we do when we have a positive screening? And so who do we refer to? So it's important that you know in your area, if you are not going to be that referring provider, maybe you are a buprenorphine provider and you treat opioid and substance use disorder, then you're going to be that referral source. But if not, then who can you send your patient to? And it's really important you have that in your arsenal. Thank you so much.