The trainings organized by students include a campaign to increase awareness about naloxone, the opioid overdose drug. Harvard Medical School’s basic life support curriculum does not include the administration of naloxone, so, students from the Center for Primary Care are teaching second-year students how to use the drug. The medical school students have also conducted trainings on how to use buprenorphine to treat opioid addiction.
The move places the students among the ranks of those who do not believe medical schools are doing enough to prepare their students to adequately face America’s deadly opioid epidemic once they become physicians.
In March, President Barack Obama’s administration asked medical schools to sign a pledge, committing their organizations to teaching their students the new federal guidelines for safe opioid prescribing practices prior to graduation. Of the country’s more than 170 medical schools, 61 signed on.
Harvard Medical School was one of the institutions that refused to sign the pledge.
In STAT, HMS Dean Jeffery Flier, MD, said, “We don’t agree with the idea of taking pledges with what to put in our curriculum…I don’t see what would limit the number of groups going through, telling us what to put in our curriculum…which would be the death of higher education.”
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