Solving Stigma Through POV Simulation: Enhancing Pharmacist Empathy-based Practices With Sickle Cell Disease Patients

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.

1. SIGNIFICANCE An unintended translational science challenge of the opioid epidemic is that \>20% of the 50+ million chronic pain patients in the US alone face opioid use stigma from pharmacy staff that has left them in debilitating pain.1 Within this cohort of stigmatized patients there's a higher portion of women and girls that have been harmed by misogynistic stereotypes of "hysteric" and "oversensitive" women exaggerating their pain, resulting in pharmacists questioning the legitimacy of their pain more than male chronic pain patients.2,3 Likewise, there's also a higher portion of Black chronic patients undertreated in their pain as racial stereotypes of Black Americans as "criminals" and "drug addicts" due to racial trauma inflected during the US War on Drugs result in Black patients being disproportionately mislabeled as drug-seeking.4 Health professional training often perpetuates misconceptions like "melanin makes skin thicker" and "white skin has more free nerve endings" that also contribute to implicit bias against giving Black patients the same level of pain management as their white counterparts.5 Woman sickle cell disease (SCD) patients are particularly vulnerable to being mislabeled as drug-seeking due to misogynistic and racist stereotyping intersectionality while managing debilitating pain from relatively invisible vaso-occlusion crisis that necessitates chronic opioid use and eventual breakthrough pain as opioid tolerance develops.6,7 While the project team has previously demonstrated that SCD patient testimonial videos partially alleviates common opioid misconceptions shared by pharmacists, the limited translation of knowledge from educational interventions to noticeable change in pharmacists' practice remains a critical knowledge gap. While tasking pharmacists to passively watch patient testimonials sharing their struggles in pain management did result in significant decreases in agreement scores to misconceptions like "opioids are always dangerous when used long term" or "a patient can receive great care without being treated for pain", baseline agreement was already very low to discriminatory statements like "race has a negligible impact on the perception of a patient's drug habits" despite continued discrimination in pharmacy practice. This disconnect between learners' knowledge of health disparities and self-awareness of deficiencies in their practice is likely due to the implicit nature of bias where microaggressions against patients persist unnoticed by the healthcare professional.8 The proposed research aligns with the translational science definition through practical application of our previous research and others' scientific discoveries toward creating innovative point-of-view (POV) simulations through a collaborative approach including an interdisciplinary research team alongside SCD community partners, with broad applicability across not just SCD patient biases but other patient-healthcare professional inte Покажи пълното описание...

Inclusion Criteria: * Practicing healthcare professional OR student in a healthcare professional program * Ability to fill opioid prescriptions Exclusion Criteria: * Not currently practicing or rotating in a clinical setting that fills opioid prescriptions