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Though medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) have proven effective in reducing illicit drug use and drug-related mortality, they remain underutilized among people living in recovery housing settings. Rachel Winograd, Associate Professor at the University of Missouri, St Louis will be leading an I-STARR funded pilot study to better understand why this may be the case. If we don’t know why something is happening, then how can we begin to fix it? 

The goal of the Missouri Infrastructure for Studying Treatment & Addiction Recovery Residences (MO I-STARR) pilot project is to create a measurement tool tailored to both recovery housing operators and residents that will accurately capture barriers to MOUD in recovery housing. Specifically, this pilot study seeks to measure both stigmatizing attitudes and operational capacity to better understand what limits MOUD from being more widely used among people living or working within recovery housing settings.

Currently, Dr. Winograd and her team are in the process of developing the MO I-STARR measure by gathering feedback from recovery house operators and residents across the country to make sure it contains questions that: tap the most important barriers; make sense to the people who will complete the measure; and will end up being optimally useful to change policy and practice in the future. The MO I-STARR team will launch an online survey in December 2023. They aim to get responses from at least 750 participants (250 operators and 500 residents). When the survey is released, they’ll be reaching out to recovery house operators and professional networks nationwide to spread the word.

We would really appreciate your help during that time, so please keep an eye out for us in December!

In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact Dr. Winograd and her team at moistarr@umsl.edu!

The inaugural 2024 National Conference on Addiction Recovery Science aims to bring together researchers at all stages of training and experience to stimulate exchange of ideas and allow for the presentation of cutting-edge research across the spectrum of alcohol and other drug use disorders and affected populations. This is the first national conference specifically dedicated to substance use disorder recovery science.

The Consortium on Addiction Recovery Science (CoARS) is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to increase our understanding of recovery support services, particularly for people with opioid use disorder (OUD) who are using or have used OUD treatment medications, through research networking, training students and early career scientists, and building community partnerships.

The conference will take place virtually on April 24th and 25th, 2024. Early bird and student discounts are available. 

Registration is open.