Lower Mainland-based initiative aims to connect addiction researchers and better equip physicians across Canada.
Addiction researchers from Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) are driving the development of the British Columbia Addiction Network – a new national research network intended to bring addiction patient care in line with current evidence-based research around addiction treatment and prevention.
“We haven’t traditionally trained physicians and other health care professionals on how to effectively diagnose and treat addictions and because of that new treatments and other discoveries emerge and often don’t get picked up and brought into practice in a timely way,” says Dr. Evan Wood, principal investigator for the BC Addiction Network project, medical director for community addiction services at VCH, and co-director of the Addiction and Urban Health Research Initiative at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.
“Our research evidence on addiction treatment and prevention is way ahead of what is actually being delivered in most heath care environments.”
According to Dr. Wood, who is also a Canada Research Chair and professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia and an attending physician in the Downtown Eastside, establishing such a network will address fundamental issues in health care delivery to patients with various addictions.
“One major challenge related to addiction treatment is the over-prescribing of inappropriate medications to individuals with addictions simply because physicians don’t know better,” he says. “This initiative is an opportunity to better design a system that can provide care based on best evidence as is the case for most other diseases in Canada.”
The British Columbia Addiction Network project recently received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and through the Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse (CRISM). The funding also allows for addiction researchers to conduct multi-site clinical trials across Canada.
The BC Addiction Network will follow a hub-and-spoke model, with VCH acting as a convenor for addiction experts in other health authorities among four project nodes: B.C., prairie provinces, Alberta, and Quebec. Each node will establish a provincial or regional infrastructure to bring people searching for addiction solutions together.
“Our initial studies need to relate to not only pressing unanswered questions in the addiction treatment world but they must also have an implementation science element,” says Dr. Wood.
“This ensures that as the work goes on, it will help bring up the standard of care in different environments.”
Evaluation of impact assessment long overdue
Addiction care has historically not been subjected to rigorous impact assessments, making it difficult to find funding for research evaluation and health care.
“We know that addiction is one of the most costly diseases in our society because of the intersection between health harms from substance abuse and community harms in terms of employment, family dysfunction, and often criminal justice costs,” says Dr. Wood. “In health care we always need to be looking at the costs of programs and how they can better meet the needs of patients in a way that acknowledges we’re dealing with a constrained resource.”
“This project will enable us to have federal funding for that critical evaluation lens right along side the care we’re providing within VCH,” adds Dr. Wood.
“It will allow us to do a lot of impact assessment and hopefully implementation science to really look to how we constantly improve what we’re doing with respect to providing care.”
