Substance use treatment has historically been siloed from the rest of more traditional healthcare. In recent years, there have been extensive efforts to make this substance use health treatment more available, including measures such as abolishing the X waiver — removing barriers to allow qualified providers to offer substance use treatment — and the adoption of the national Office-Based Addiction Treatment (OBAT) model, a program designed to bring substance use treatment into the outpatient primary care setting. As the field begins to take a more patient-centered, community-engaged approach, the field has become more diverse, bringing in more peer specialists, social workers, and people with lived experience into care teams.

Despite the wealth of knowledge that navigators and peer recovery specialists bring to substance use care, they often have not received formal training on substance use, substance use treatment, harm reduction, stigma, or care planning with people who use drugs. To address this, the Camden Coalition created a free, virtual OBAT Care Team Training to support SUD care teams in New Jersey to ensure that providers and navigators have all of the skills needed to translate their clinical and lived experience into substance use treatment settings.

Understanding the OBAT model

In 2019, New Jersey introduced NJ MATrx, a program based on the national OBAT model. The goal of the OBAT model is to increase access to addiction medicine care by bringing substance use treatment to non-addiction medicine settings, like primary care and other outpatient practices. In New Jersey, the model has two components: a provider who provides medications for addiction treatment (MAT) and a navigator who supports the social determinants that many people with substance use disorders experience, such as transportation barriers, insurance access, and healthcare system navigation literacy. Navigators come from a wide variety of backgrounds — they can be people with lived experience, nurses, medical assistants, and more. The OBAT Care Team Training was developed to close the training gap and ensure that all team members have access to the information they need to provide the highest quality care possible.

Developing the training

We began by thinking about the most essential elements of the OBAT model and providing substance use treatment – understanding role clarity and flexibility, stigma, substance use and recovery, harm reduction, and care planning. These topics became the focus of each of the five courses within the curriculum. We partnered with experienced navigators and people with lived experience to ensure we were focusing on the skills and resources that would be most beneficial to New Jersey’s substance use workforce. The NJ Centers for Excellence, created by the NJ Department of Human Services to increase access to substance use treatment through education and mentorship for SUD providers, reviewed the materials to ensure our information was clinically accurate.

The curriculum leverages the voices of OBAT navigators, prescribers, and people with substance use disorders to provide those working in the substance use field with the tools they need to succeed. We aimed to provide tangible skills and resources for anyone involved in substance use care because we know that everyone – from schedulers, front desk staff, medical assistants, and beyond – play a role in someone’s treatment and recovery.

In the field

Jefferson Health has trained all of its staff at OBAT locations using the OBAT Care Team training. After taking the training, their Director of MAT services said,

Providing people – especially people who have been traditionally missed by formal substance use education – with the tools and resources they need to succeed and take care of themselves was a fundamental goal of developing the OBAT Care Team training. Navigators and peer recovery specialists often have not received any education about harm reduction, stigma, care planning and other practical skills that are essential for supporting individuals on their treatment and recovery journey. We aimed to fix that by developing a training that focused on them.

More information about the Camden Coalition’s work in this area can be found on our website. For specific questions about our training or to talk about customized training options for your New Jersey SUD Care team, contact [email protected].