Practice partnerships make perfect
UIC Nursing faculty and students are joining forces with other UIC healthcare professionals, bringing more nurse practitioners into the fight against the opioid epidemic and helping to improve pediatric dental care.
CONFRONTING ADDICTION In Chicago, opioid-related overdose deaths increased by 50% during the first six months of 2020 over the same period in the previous year. (above, top) Nursing clinical assistant professor Karen Cotler, pharmacy assistant professor Jennie Jarrett, and trainees Sooyoung Yeom and Stephanie Guerrero in front of the COIP mobile clinic. (above, bottom) Faculty Jacqueline Wolak Shanks and Celeste Schultz at the UIC Pediatric Dentistry Outpatient Care Center.
In her five years as a nurse on a stepdown unit at UI Health, Sooyoung Yeom, DNP ’21, FNP-BC, frequently cared for patients going through active withdrawal from substance use. The patients looked “miserable,” Yeom says, presenting with severe pain, nausea and discomfort. What was even worse, she says, was seeing the same patients land in her unit again and again. “They keep coming over and over and over again,” she says. “I thought they would get some help and recover in a rehab program. But even if they get some help, they keep coming back.” Yeom says she now believes that prevention and harm reduction are the biggest tools in the battle against opioid addiction, which is why she’s one of two nurse practitioners taking part in the inaugural year of a UIC Nursing-led training program to integrate work with patients with substance use disorders into primary care practice.
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