As opioid overdose deaths in the United States continue to climb, medical students must be prepared to prevent and treat opioid use disorder and opioid overdose. The administration of naloxone is an evidence-based way to reverse overdoses and save lives. At our medical school, a coalition of medical students, emergency medicine educators, and administrators worked together to permanently integrate naloxone rescue training into the Basic Life Support (BLS) curriculum required of all first-year medical students. This article outlines an argument for the integration of naloxone rescue into BLS training and an introduction to emergency medical care for medical students. The authors then describe the steps that students took to transform this program from an original pilot to a formally integrated curriculum offered to all first-year medical students. The article highlights the role of medical student advocacy in curriculum design and its potential to align medical training with community health needs, such as the ongoing opioid epidemic.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.