AMERSA 2025 Conference Sessions

The Wednesday pre-conference registration fee includes SITE VISITS: Locations TBA soon! INTERACTIVE ADVOCACY WORKSHOP: “Using the Law to Advocate for People who Use Drugs,' This workshop will covers strategies for addressing discrimination against people who use drugs (PWUD) and protecting confidentiality of criminalized health data. FILM SCREENING: Join us for a screening of 'Do No Harm,' a short documentary film by Joanna Rudnick to be released fall of 2025 on PBS, focused on the journey of a woman with opioid use disorder and her ultimate recovery engaging with welcoming, evidence-based treatment integrated into her hospital care.

The Wednesday pre-conference registration fee includes SITE VISITS: Locations TBA soon! INTERACTIVE ADVOCACY WORKSHOP: “Using the Law to Advocate for People who Use Drugs,' This workshop will covers strategies for addressing discrimination against people who use drugs (PWUD) and protecting confidentiality of criminalized health data. FILM SCREENING: Join us for a screening of 'Do No Harm,' a short documentary film by Joanna Rudnick to be released fall of 2025 on PBS, focused on the journey of a woman with opioid use disorder and her ultimate recovery engaging with welcoming, evidence-based treatment integrated into her hospital care.

This workshop will share the University of Maryland experience in implementing telemedicine-based MOUD in rural jails. Attendees will learn about program protocols, best practices, implementation challenges, and facilitators from both the UMB (Hub) and jail (Spoke) perspectives and will also learn about the creative research opportunities afforded with this platform. Key topics will include correctional staff involvement, medication administration, risk mitigation, and research opportunities. Telemedicine offers a flexible solution, addressing the demand for addiction medicine treatment in rural areas and circumventing challenges associated with treatment of incarcerated individuals. Attendees will gain insight into the crucial components of a successful telemedicine treatment program for OUD.

Responding to inequities, a multidisciplinary task force at San Francisco General Hospital developed and implemented a multidisciplinary timeout process prior to reporting newborns to child welfare. This intervention’s goal was to slow down the decision-making process, a known evidence-based approach to reduce bias, decrease unnecessary reports, and increase transparency around child welfare reporting. Birth centers around the country lack practical strategies to halt inequities in child welfare referrals. In this workshop, we will share insights on how to build consensus around the importance of developing a timeout process, as well as how to implement timeouts prior to child welfare referrals for substance-exposed newborns.

The session will incorporate experiential learning, interactive discussions, and applied case studies to deepen participants’ understanding of advocacy for underserved and under-resourced communities. Multidisciplinary treatment team members will be equipped with the tools to navigate service barriers, collaborate with community resources, and ensure clients receive the care to which they are entitled. By strengthening advocacy skills, we can improve outcomes for underserved populations and uphold ethical standards in addiction treatment.

In this experiential workshop, participants will review the most common objections to harm reduction and learn and practice concrete strategies to respond to questions and objections. Participants will learn how Adult Learning Theory can help explain the “heat” behind some of these objections and will practice using the techniques of validation and limited information to diffuse tension and promote learning.

This three-part workshop provides practitioners with an evidence-based solution for caregivers of adolescents and young adults (AYAs) using substances who appear to be resistant to treatment. We teach skills from the Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT) intervention, an effective approach to train caregivers of pre-contemplative AYAs with substance use disorders (SUDs). CRAFT has been found to be effective in engaging AYAs in treatment, reducing AYA substance use, and mitigating AYA-caregiver stress.

This workshop will address the complex grey area created by the lack of consensus over the meaning of “lived experience” and the forms of institutional stigma that peers continue to face following disclosure. This workshop responds to two critical needs:Operationalizing Lived Experience: The first part of the workshop will present a new framework for operationalizing lived experience based on a forthcoming systematic review of the CPRS literature and a three-year CDC-funded investigation into the Rhode Island Emergency Department peer specialist program. Navigating Ethical Dilemmas: The second part of the workshop will present and troubleshoot four common scenarios where CPRSs face discrimination related to disclosure based on the facilitators’ nearly three decades combined experience working in the peer field.

At their best, academic/tribal partnerships synergize elements of evidence-based practice with culturally relevant care delivery models to provide effective and tailored SUD treatment access. The University of Utah and University of New Mexico have partnered with Navajo (Diné) communities and the Utah Navajo Health System—a large, community-based tribal healthcare organization—to build relationships through various academic and clinical pursuits. These collaborations have culminated in a recent federally funded project to develop a community-led, SUD-focused research program through a community-based participatory research (CBPR) process. This workshop will teach five principles described in the CBPR literature that foster success in a tribal-academic partnership for SUD research and support successful community-based participatory research more broadly: (1) cultural narrative, (2) cultural humility, (3) relational trust, (4) relational accountability (positive kinship), and (5) symbolic language.

This session will emphasize interactive problem-solving, small group discussions tailored to participants' unique workplace environments, and peer knowledge exchange to provide concrete takeaways on how to optimize inpatient interprofessional addiction medicine consult services (ACS). Attendees will leave with actionable strategies and at least 1–2 real-world examples of how other institutions have addressed common challenges such as expanding access to medications, implementing non-stigmatizing hospital policies, supporting a thriving interdisciplinary team, and demonstrating value to leadership.

Direct-to-Inject (DTI) extended-release buprenorphine represents a promising intervention, yet many healthcare settings lack standardized protocols for its use. This workshop builds on a team's extensive experience developing and implementing clinical guidelines through California Bridge, a program that has successfully expanded access to evidence-based treatment for substance use disorders across diverse healthcare settings. The approach addresses the urgent need for practical, setting-specific protocols tailored for emergency departments, clinics, mobile health/street medicine teams, and EMS that can be immediately implemented upon return to participants' practice settings. Participants will develop concrete skills in collaborative protocol development that can be applied to various substance use interventions within their institutions.

This interactive workshop will review the clinical rationale and operational details of “rapid” methadone initiations (RMI), including patient selection criteria, dosing protocols, and safety and effectiveness outcomes associated with RMI to-date. Participants will breakout with facilitators and utilize quality improvement methods to explore approaches to implementing RMI protocols in the acute-care/bridge, OTP, or obstetric care setting.

This workshop will enhance participants’ understanding of the Child Protective Services (CPS) system and provide them with patient centered tools they can use in their own practices. By developing skills to prepare patients for CPS involvement, creating appropriate documentation, evaluating reporting thresholds, and maintaining therapeutic relationships, clinicians can better support family preservation while fulfilling their professional obligations. These skills are essential for improving outcomes for pregnant and parenting patients with substance use disorders and their children.

This workshop integrates the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) Clinical Practice Guidelines for standardized benzodiazepine tapering recommendations with consensus-based recommendations from a multidisciplinary panel. It offers practical training in individualized tapering approaches, such as micro-tapering, hyperbolic dose reductions, and dose reversibility, as well as the incorporation of adjunctive psychosocial interventions. This workshop builds critical skills in shared decision-making, harm-reduction, and clinical coordination across disciplines. It also aligns with current policy trends around prescription monitoring and deprescribing goals associated with HEDIS metrics, helping providers implement these policies ethically and safely.

Rural and tribal communities face unique barriers, including long travel distances, stigma, confidentiality challenges, workforce shortages, and high-threshold treatment practices. This skill-building workshop will explore a variety of state and federal exemptions and innovative workarounds that can expand MOUD and harm reduction services in rural and tribal communities. Participants will leave with concrete strategies and examples that can be adapted and implemented in their home communities.

Many of us have internalized the dominant narrative of substance use and unintentionally tell stories steeped in stigma in both personal and professional settings. The science of storytelling provides context for how we reinforce disvalued narratives in therapeutic spaces and public advocacy, in policy, the media, education, medical records, and in individual interactions even when we care deeply about people who use/d drugs. Through discussion and exercises, participants will identify the characteristics of the dominant narrative and understand its roots; recognize how they may be perpetuating stigma within their own sphere of influence; and leave able to promote more positive, nuanced, strength-based narratives.

This workshop will address the current gaps in addiction treatment for incarcerated patients, focusing on developing effective strategies for bridging this gap. By emphasizing integrated care models, collaboration between correctional and community-based services, and post-release planning, this workshop seeks to improve treatment outcomes and support long-term recovery for this vulnerable population.