WASHINGTON – Friday, U.S. Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Mike Braun (R-IN) called on the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to require more training for medical providers in treating substance use disorders, so that more people can get the help that they need.

In the letter to the ACGME Chair, the Senators write, “The ACGME must swiftly update its specialty requirements to ensure that physicians-in-training gain the skills needed to address the current crisis. The overdose crisis has persisted in part because of the dearth of treatment providers. Just one in five individuals with an opioid use disorder receives the treatment they need. As of 2019, fewer than seven percent of all physicians prescribe buprenorphine for an opioid use disorder.”

The Senators continue, “ACGME has taken some steps to improve resident education on substance use disorder recognition, but experts believe the organization has not done enough to address the treatment of substance use disorders…Leading experts have recommended that residency programs be required to train physicians in addiction treatment.”

The Senators also discuss how updating requirements would better fulfill ACGME’s mission, stating, “The ACGME’s general requirements are due for an update, and the specialty working groups update their requirements on an ongoing basis, meaning that there are opportunities for these updates to be issued in the near future. New requirements would align with the mission of the ACGME, which is ‘to improve health care and population health by assessing and enhancing the quality of resident and fellow physicians’ education.'”

The letter is part of Senator Hassan’s ongoing bipartisan efforts to increase access to substance misuse treatment. She introduced bipartisan legislation to create 1,000 new medical residency positions focused on addiction medicine at teaching hospitals in New Hampshire, Maine, and across the country. This bill builds on progress that Senators Hassan and Susan Collins (R-ME) made through previous legislation that was signed into law that increased the number of Medicare-supported graduate medical education training positions by 1,000, but did not specify a specialty for the positions.

Since 2017, Senator Hassan has successfully worked to secure a nine-fold increase in funding to New Hampshire to address the substance use disorder epidemic. The Senator has also led bipartisan efforts to vastly increase access to life-saving addiction medicine by pushing to eliminate a requirement that currently blocks millions of highly trained health professionals from prescribing medication-assisted treatment to their patients.