Innovative Teaching Approaches to Integrating Substance Use Disorder Training into Midwifery and Women's Health Nurse Practitioner Education Programs

Substance use disorder (SUD) is the most common cause of pregnancy-associated deaths for women in Illinois. In this article, we describe how to provide multimodality education and teaching opportunities in SUD and medication for opioid use disorder, incorporate community outreach to offer new experiential clinical learning opportunities, and enhance preceptor relationships to bolster educational partnerships as an innovative approach to incorporating SUD education into midwifery programs. Our teaching efforts identify the most vulnerable communities and create an innovative, midwifery-led solution to provide much-needed culturally aligned care addressing health disparities of those in rural and underserved communities. We highlight our utilization of an online education and training platform that students enroll in to obtain foundational knowledge in medication management for opioid use disorder, describe how we expanded clinical partnerships with providers actively providing medication management for opioid use disorders, and discuss how we evaluated those experiences and provided teaching/learning opportunities for students to present material across multiple cohorts of students. This innovative approach to integrating education for medication management of SUD through the above teaching modalities highlights our ability to meet the needs of our patients and prepare the future midwifery workforce with the clinical skills necessary for the work needed in clinical settings across the United States.