A mixed methods analysis of clinics’ perspectives on community factors influencing access to medications for opioid use disorder

TL;DR

This study explores how community attitudes and clinic relationships affect access to opioid use disorder medications, finding that stronger clinic networks improve care and morale.

Contribution

The novel contribution is a mixed-methods analysis linking community attitudes and clinic collaboration to access and quality of MOUD.

Findings

Clinic relationships improve staff morale and patient care in areas with low community support for MOUD.

System-level policies and reimbursement barriers remain challenges for expanding MOUD services.

Community attitudes toward MOUD have improved over time, partly due to clinic outreach efforts.

Abstract

How communities impact patients taking medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) has not been well-studied. Understanding the experience of MOUD providers allows us to better understand and measure community attitudes toward MOUD and identify strategies to increase support.

We deployed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design to analyze baseline data from the SITT-MAT clinical trial. Our quantitative instrument was seven Likert-scale questions asking about community attitudes toward MOUD analyzed through means, standard deviations, and principal components. The qualitative data were semi-structured interviews coded inductively using a thematic analysis. The quantitative and qualitative results were integrated to produce the findings.

We surveyed staff from 20 specialty care addiction and primary care clinics in Washington state as part of a larger clinical trial. Eleven sites were also selected to complete an interview. Participating clinics were primarily specialty addiction treatment programs (N = 14, 70%), outpatient (N = 17, 85%), and/or located in urban areas (N = 12, 81%). In the survey, participants most agreed that relationships with other clinics help provide better care and least agreed that system-level policies mandate MOUD. In interviews, some staff described how reliable relationships with other clinics improved employee morale and patient care while others added that loose collaborations had fallen apart, leaving patients without the care they need. Interviewees described how insurer and government policies have made it difficult to expand their MOUD offerings. The interview data also indicated community attitudes on MOUD have improved over time with some clinics using direct outreach to garner support for MOUD.

Our results suggest that building local peer networks of clinics can improve staff morale and patient care in areas where community support for MOUD is low. Though system-level barriers to MOUD have been reduced, there is still room for improvement in simplifying reimbursements and funding for clinics looking to improve care. Our findings encourage further measurement of community attitudes toward MOUD and development of implementation strategies to build networks that support patients and clinics alike.

The data for this study is from the Stagewise Implementation-to-Target – Medications for Addiction Treatment clinical trial registered as NCT05343793 on April 25, 2022.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13722-025-00643-1.