Emma Pagels Mardhed
Lund University, Sweden
Title: Clinical outcome and patient perspectives on opiate maintenance treatment for opiate dependence
Biography
Biography: Emma Pagels Mardhed
Abstract
Opioid Maintenance Treatment (OMT) with Methadone or Buprenorphine is a well-documented and successful treatment in opiate dependence. A new aspect on OMT is the patients’ own experience of the treatment. Earlier on, the efficiency of the treatment (OMT) has been measured with more “hard data” such as mortality, drug overdoses and criminality. There is an increasing focus on evaluating the effects of OMT on quality of life, and voices are being raised to evaluate the content of the treatment from the patients’ own perspective. This study aims to investigate the patient satisfaction and its importance in OMT, both in out-patient treatment and in in-patient withdrawal treatment of individuals with an opiate dependence, and its potential impact on treatment outcome. Four different surveys are being used, three in the out-patient setting, investigating the satisfaction with OMT in general one investigating the satisfaction with the actual medication and one in the in-patient setting, investigating the satisfaction of their in-patient withdrawal treatment. In addition to this, baseline-data as well as follow-up data will be collected to study potential correlations of the patients’ satisfaction with the course of the treatment.