Expanding Access to Nurse-Led Models of Care

PI: Cheyenne Johnson (BC Centre on Substance Use, BC)

Leadership Group:  Steven Wintoniw (Association of Registered Nurses Manitoba, MB); Donna Cooke (Saskatchewan Registered Nurses Association, SK); Emilie Lizotte-Chin & Suzanne Brissette (University of Montreal, QC); Michael Lee & Janice Pyne (Addiction Recovery and Community Health Clinic, AB);  Mae Katt (Thunder Bay, ON); Samantha Robinson  (BCCSU, BC); Lynn Miller (College of Registered Nurses of Nova Scotia, NS)

 This project is comprised of four components which will build understanding of the current state of practice for OUD care by the nursing profession and develop recommendations and tools that will drive change in care and treatment for individuals with OUD. This project will result in evidence-based changes to policy and practice which will allow nursing professionals to provide care at the top of their scope of practice. This, in turn, will improve outcomes for individuals seeking treatment by expanding access and improving quality of care through increased capacity of treatment prescribers and by championing an innovative model of care for OUD treatment.

This project aims to build an understanding of the current state of nursing practice relating to OUD care across jurisdictions across Canada, to identify innovative practice and models of care that can expand access to care and improve outcomes for individuals receiving treatment, and to identify gaps and barriers in current practice.

The four components for the project are:

• National scoping review to clearly articulate the need for nursing-led models of care for expanding OUD care, identify innovative nursing practice and models of care in Canada, Identify evidence-informed practices and models of care that improve outcomes for people living with opioid use disorder, Identify barriers to nurse-led OUD care and opportunities for closing gaps related to Nursing regulations and standards and OUD care education;
• Development of a set of national recommendations will be developed for the nursing profession based on the findings of the scoping review in order to articulate the findings of the scoping review into clear recommendations for best practice and opportunities to expand access to care and to support the expansion and scale-up of best practices in other regions;
• Knowledge translation (KT) and advocacy activities to develop knowledge translation and implementation mechanisms, with the goal of building shared educational modules with standardized competencies and manuals for nursing-led models of care that could be implemented in various jurisdictions;
• Pilot implementation of a nurse-led model of care adapted to the Canadian context where nurse practitioners are utilized as prescribers where allowed, develop a standardized procedure manual that can be used to support implementation of this model in other Canadian jurisdictions and evaluate the success of the model in comparison to existing practice.