Property and casualty insurer The Hartford is joining forces with the Yale School of Medicine to develop a pilot program that will teach healthcare workers how to navigate and respond to addiction and chronic pain in their treatment of injured workers.

In an effort headed by Yale professors David Fiellin and Jeanette Tetrault, the Yale Program in Addiction Management will develop training that will help clinicians identify and treat acute pain, chronic pain, substance misuse and substance and opioid use disorders among Connecticut workers. The curriculum will place a strong emphasis on reducing the stigma surrounding pain and addiction issues, Fiellin said, with the ultimate goal of improving patients' quality of life and helping them return to the workforce.

The first phase of the pilot, already underway, includes the development of training modules and a compendium of clinically relevant resources. In phase two, scheduled to run from January to June 2022, a cohort of between 50 and 100 Connecticut medical professionals will undergo the training and apply it to their own practices, and in phase three the modules will be updated based on their feedback.

In an interview with the Hartford Business Journal, The Hartford's Chairman and CEO Christopher Swift said the program will try to put forward a new paradigm for workers' recuperation that does not rely on opioid painkillers, which not only cause overdoses and deaths but make people struggling with addiction functionally unable to hold a job in many cases, leading to poverty and the disintegration of families.

"We bring a workers comp perspective, and we certainly see this as an economic issue," Swift said. "But it has other societal impacts, on happiness and well-functioning families. It creates a lot of hardship and difficulty."

Fiellin said the training is designed to help overcome some of the unhelpful attitudes that medical professionals may have about opioid addiction and substance misuse issues in general.

"There's still a stigma," he said. "Most clinicians practicing now were trained at a time when they didn't have the understanding of addiction we do now. They're not immune to seeing addiction as a failure of the will."

Both Swift and Fiellin said they hope the pilot can start to shift thinking within the medical community and help healthcare workers get a handle on the enormity of the problem.

"For each individual who overdoses and dies, there are many more people impacted, dealing with the fallout in some way," Fiellin said. "It's a pervasive problem."

Elected officials offered praise for the program, among them U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who said the need for solutions has only been amplified by the destabilizing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I applaud The Hartford and the Yale School of Medicine for leading the way in providing internationally-recognized innovative training to help curb the opioid epidemic, which has a corrosive grip on communities here in Connecticut and across the country," Blumenthal said. "Compounded by the loss of loved ones and isolation caused by the COVID crisis, the heartbreaking numbers of people lost to substance use disorder continues to soar. It's long past time we remove the stigma from this illness and implement more widely appropriate medical and evidence-based treatments."

Attachments

  • Original document
  • Permalink

Disclaimer

Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. published this content on 05 November 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 09 November 2021 17:54:06 UTC.