Why This Research Matters (Significance)
1 in 5 of the 50+ million people with chronic pain in the U.S. face stigma when using opioids, especially women and racial minorities. This stigma often comes from pharmacy staff treating chronic pain patients as drug seekers, who then refuse to fill the patient's script, and leave the patient in severe pain. The team has found that having pharmacists watch testimonial videos of sickle cell patients sharing their pain management struggles can help reduce these misconceptions. However, using point of view simulations could be even more effective in fostering empathy among pharmacists. The goal is to create an educational simulation that helps pharmacists better understand and manage pain in sickle cell patients, ultimately improving their care.
What Makes This Research Unique (Innovation) Traditional methods to address biases in healthcare include watching patient testimonials or using expensive actors to play a standardized patient interaction to health professionals. This innovative point of view simulations engage participants' empathy more effectively by playing back what participants told the patient from the patient's point of view and are more accessible by having participants interact with the simulation on the computer any time and any place, rather than organizing a paid actor to visit the hospital. With advancements in artificial intelligence, we can create interactive simulations where virtual patients respond dynamically to questions, making the experience more realistic and impactful.
How Will the Researchers Conduct the Research (Approach)
The researchers will test if point of view simulations can reduce misconceptions among healthcare professionals and improve pain management for sickle cell patients. Here's the plan:
1. Create and Implement the Simulation: Use it as part of the training for pharmacy and hospital staff, as well as nursing and pharmacy students. 2. Survey Participants: Before and after the simulation, participants will take a survey to measure their misconceptions about opioid use. 3. Follow-Up: Six months later, researchers will survey the participants' patients and their managers to see if there's been an improvement in the empathetic care the participants provided.
Practicing healthcare professional OR student in a healthcare professional program
Ability to fill opioid prescriptions
Not currently practicing or rotating in a clinical setting that fills opioid prescriptions
Crossover
point of view simulation
BehavioralIn POV simulations, participants actively engage with a patient looking to fill an opioid script at a community pharmacy setting through the point of view of the pharmacist. Using a "choose your own adventure" branch chain format, our research team has already drafted interaction pathways where participants can respond to the patient with empathy-based practice, act on a common misconception around chronic opioid use, or mislabel the patient as drug seeking. After 3-4 interaction branches, the participants reach a decision to fill the opioid script, deny it, or some variation of delaying the script being filled. The POV simulation then replays the participant's choices back to them from the patient's point of view, revealing that the SCD patient was in genuine pain and engaging participant's empathy as they rewatch their microaggressive and mislabeled drug seeker choices through the patient's POV.
Control
BehavioralParticipants will watch a hematology educational video unrelated to pain management
Agreement/disagreement toward opioid use misconceptions
An experimentally validated, 16-item opioid stigma misconceptions survey right before starting the POV simulation and again 10 days afterwards with the aim to assess alleviation of misconceptions most impactful to chronic pain patients such as sickle cell disease patients.
Frequency of empathy-based care practices when filling opioid prescriptions
Three months after completing the POV simulation, sickle cell patients on the research team will also be invited to complete a 12-item expert-validated survey on the participants' empathetic care with the aim to assess impacts of the POV simulation on patient care.
Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.
Ohio State University
Lead sponsor
Howard University
Collaborator
Fairleigh Dickinson University
Collaborator
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)
Collaborator
This trial is not recruiting at the moment. You can still explore other options:
