Improving Care for Patients with Substance Use Disorders

Education | Outreach | Treatment

California Residency Program Collaborative

Sponsored by California Academy of Family Physicians and CAFP Foundation

Since 2019, and with the support from California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) DHCS Opioid Response, CAFP and CAFP-F have led three separate multi-specialty California Residency Program Collaboratives (CRPC) aimed at improving care for patients with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) and Substance/Stimulant Use Disorder (SUD). The collaborative has awarded 68 grants to family medicine, emergency medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and psychiatry residency programs based on their proposed local initiatives to reach our collaborative goals:

Advance the training of primary care residents and physicians in the field of substance use disorder disease screening, diagnosis, and treatment
Improve the patient experience of care (including quality and satisfaction);
Promote care that is patient-centric, and evidence-based, engaging the community in the overall management of substance use disorder.

California Residency Program Collaborative III

Working together as a multispecialty collaborative, our 25 California residency programs worked for 14+ months on their projects to implement local programs to improve services for OUD/SUD patients with a specific focus on reaching larger populations of underserved and vulnerable patients. Grantees not only succeeded at meeting identified goals to improve care; but their efforts have spawned a sea change in the way residents, residency programs, and health systems now view and offer services for their patients experiencing pain and OUD/SUD. They were also able to break down long-held institutional silos between departments and specialties, establish new addiction care rotations and curriculum, include nurses and the entire care team in educational sessions, and better coordinate care for patients. DHCS funds also supported a Podcast series, MOUD Champions campaign, QI Project and Health Equity Roundtable. A final report, which includes reports from each program and QI resources, was submitted to DHCS in June 2024.

View Final Report

California Residency Program Collaborative II

Our 16 residency programs worked for over a year on their projects and during that time also worked as a collaborative – meeting to share resources, best practices, challenges and results. Projects identified methods to improve and advance the standard of care for patients, demonstrated how best to implement those methods, and evaluated the outcomes of these efforts. A final report, which includes reports from each program, was submitted to DHCS in September 2022.

View Final Report