About our OBAT work

NJ Family Care’s Office-Based Addiction Treatment (OBAT) program is designed to make it easier for New Jersey Medicaid beneficiaries to access medications for addiction treatment (MAT) — evidence-based treatments for substance use disorders — through primary care and other ambulatory settings. OBAT provides additional supports and reduces administrative barriers for primary care and other outpatient clinicians to provide addiction treatment without needing to refer patients out to behavioral health services.

The OBAT model calls for OBAT navigators — nurses, social workers, and/or individuals with lived experience of addiction — to support the psychosocial needs of patients through all phases of their treatment.

We provide regular trainings for OBAT and other addiction treatment navigators that include lessons on harm reduction, trauma-informed care, relationship-building, care-planning, and more.

We also provide regular virtual venues for all New Jersey providers who support addiction treatment and navigation in New Jersey to receive support, training, and case conferencing. These include our bi-monthly MAT lunch hours and quarterly SUD navigation support calls.

If you have questions or would like more information, contact Laura Sorensen, Senior Program Manager for Substance Use, Harm Reduction and Behavioral Health Initiatives, at [email protected].

OBAT navigator training

This training series focuses on foundational knowledge and actionable information for OBAT navigators including:

• Introduction to substance use disorders, harm reduction, trauma-informed care, and the OBAT model
• Approaches for building relationships and putting harm reduction, trauma-informed care, and care-planning into practice in a clinic-based setting
• Best practices in connecting patients to behavioral health and social service resources including specific community resource identification and referral tools

The training series is free for OBAT navigators and providers/clinical support staff. If you are not an OBAT navigator or a provider but are interested in participating in the training, please contact us.

Participants are awarded a Certification of Completion at the end of each cohort. Participants are required to attend all sessions in order to receive a Certificate of Completion. If you are unable to attend all of the sessions but would still like to attend, please contact us for approval before registering.

License-specific CEUs are available for nurses, social workers, pharmacists, and physicians, and interdisciplinary continuing education credits are available for other disciplines.

If you have questions or would like more information, contact Gladys Antelo-Allen at [email protected].

MAT lunch hours

Co-hosted with New Jersey’s MAT Centers of Excellence, the medications for addiction treatment (MAT) lunch hours are hour-long virtual meetings to hear from experts and discuss the latest in clinical and non-clinical issues affecting the MAT patient population. Providers, OBAT navigators, peers, advocates, and other stakeholders working in New Jersey’s substance use disorder field are welcome to attend. If you have questions or would like more information, contact Shelby Kehoe, Program Manager for Policy & Advocacy, at [email protected].

MAT Lunch Hours are held every other month on third Wednesdays at 12 pm ET:

• June 28, 2023
•  August 23, 2023
• October 25, 2023
• December 27, 2023

SUD navigation support calls

In addition to the main OBAT navigator training, we offer quarterly case conferencing and skills lab calls to provide ongoing opportunity for OBAT navigators and other substance use disorder (SUD) navigators/case managers in New Jersey to continue learning through:

• Hour-long deep dives into particular content areas
• Discussion of (de-identified) patient cases and support thinking through patient engagement strategies, potential resources, and how to practice self-care while doing this work
• Presentations and sharing updated resources about relevant topics such as harm reduction, strategies for identifying new community resources, trauma-informed care, self-care, and more

In 2023 these calls will take place quarterly on the following dates, from 12-1 pm ET:

• June 22, 2023
• September 21, 2023
• November 16, 2023