AMERSA’s 42nd annual meeting: Highlights, abstracts and awards, and an appreciation to our peer reviewers

AMERSA (now officially named the Association for Multidisciplinary Education and Research in Substance use and Addiction) was founded in 1976 and is a nonprofit, professional organization whose mission is to improve health and well-being through interdisciplinary leadership in substance use education, research, clinical care, and policy. AMERSA hosted its 42nd annual national meeting entitled “Interdisciplinary Addiction Strategies: Discover, Prevent, Treat, Teach” on November 8–10, 2018, in San Francisco, California. The conferences was organized by conference chairs Matthew Tierney, RN, MSN, NP; Claire Anne Simeone, DNP, MSN, FNP, RN; and Scott Hadland, MD, MPH, MS.

The 2018 AMERSA annual conference objectives included to utilize newly obtained skills in teaching and clinical approaches; apply knowledge of existing research and research gaps to implement innovative research programs in the field of substance use; apply new scientific advances to teaching and clinical experiences; understand substance use–related policy and apply it to teaching or clinical opportunities; make use of mentoring opportunities to expand clinical, teaching, and/or research opportunities; and understand the need for collaboration in successful programming.

With 375 attendees from the fields including nursing, social work and behavioral health, psychiatry, medicine, pharmacy, research, and policy, the conference provided a platform for the presentation of current challenges and innovations in research, education, and clinical practice in addiction prevention and treatment, as well as opportunities for collegial discussion and networking.

Many attendees participated in opportunities to visit local San Francisco agencies doing innovative work in the field. Special interest group meetings (nursing, social work and behavioral health, physicians, adolescent and youth initiative, and medication for substance use disorders initiative) and mentor-mentee opportunities provided additional platforms for attendees to incorporate the conference information into their practices and rounded out the meeting.

During the conference, AMERSA presented several prestigious awards. The Marianne T. Marcus, EdD, RN, FAAN, Nursing Scholarship Award was awarded to Khadejah F. Mahmoud, PhD(c), MSN. The David C. Lewis, MD, Service to AMERSA Award was awarded to Sidney H. Schnoll, MD, PhD. The AMERSA New Investigator/Educator Award was awarded to Jessica S. Merlin, MD, MBA. The W. Anderson Spickard, Jr. Excellence in Mentorship Award was awarded to Jeanette M. Tetrault, MD, FACP, FASAM. The Betty Ford Award was awarded to Jalie A. Tucker, PhD, MPH. Finally, the John P. McGovern Award was awarded to Kevin Kunz, MD, MPH, DFASAM.

Beyond the provocative plenaries, the conference was rich with opportunities for smaller-group discussion of current trends in educational, clinical, research, and policy work by both senior and junior professionals working in the field. Poster sessions, skill-development workshops, and brief oral presentations offered a broad spectrum of topics in substance use and addiction from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Of the 202 scientific abstracts submitted to be presented at the conference, 66 were accepted as oral presentations, 103 as poster presentations, and 6 workshop presentations. Substance Abuse has a rich history of publishing the abstracts of the AMERSA annual conference, and we are proud to provide this forum to disseminate AMERSA attendees’ scholarship in the addiction field.^1–4 The accepted oral and poster presentations are presented as an online supplement to this article.

The editors of Substance Abuse, the official journal of AMERSA, also presented annual awards for Best Manuscript of 2018, Most Downloaded Manuscript of 2018, and Best Peer Reviewer of 2018.

For Substance Abuse 2018 Best Manuscript, we recognized a manuscript that clearly articulated research or policies designed to advance the identification and treatment of substance use disorders and/or the training of providers that care for patients with substance use or addictions. To meet the criteria for the award, the article had to been published between October 2017 and September 2018. The 2018 Best Manuscript was awarded to Randi Sokol, MD, MPH, MMedEd, and colleagues for their article “Why use group visits for opioid use disorder treatment in primary care? A patient-centered qualitative study.”⁵

Beginning in 2014, Substance Abuse has annually recognized the Most Downloaded Manuscript. The 2018 Substance Abuse journal Most Downloaded Manuscript was given to the article with the most full-text downloads within the previous 2 years (October 2016–September 2018, Volume 36.4–38.3) according to data from our publisher, Taylor & Francis Group. The awarded article was a repeat winner from 2017 and is currently our most downloaded article of all time. The 2018 awardee is Stefan Kertesz, MD, MSc, who authored the article “Turning the Tide or Riptide? The Changing Opioid Epidemic.”⁶

In addition, since 2014, Substance Abuse has recognized the Best Peer Reviewer on an annual basis.⁷ For 2018, the Executive Editorial Board considered over 250 peer reviews provided between October 2017 and September 2018. Our electronic platform allows us to rate reviewers for timeliness and relevance of the review. We seek to recognize excellence in reviews that were thorough, considered the article within the context of current addiction literature, and provided specific recommendations for improvement or clarification to authors. This year we awarded two scholars for excellence in peer review, Sara Bartel and Gwen Lapham, PhD, MPH, MSW.

Throughout 2018, Substance Abuse received many quality peer reviews for manuscripts being considered for publication in our journal. Peer review of manuscripts is not easy and can be labor intensive, but paramount to success of our journal. The Substance Abuse journal recognizes all of the peer reviewers who contributed to the excellence of our journal. The names of these reviewers are provided in online supplement to this article. Thank you to our reviewers!

In summary, AMERSA’s annual conference best reflects the organization’s mission to improve health and well-being through interdisciplinary leadership in substance use education, research, clinical care, and policy (www.amersa.org). AMERSA is a growing organization, and we look forward to continuing to recognizing its annual accomplishments and scholarship disseminated at its conferences and through our journal.