Gov. Peter Shumlin is praising a new federal rule that will allow nurse practitioners and physician assistants to prescribe the addiction treatment medication Suboxone, also known as buprenorphine.
The rule from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will allow the two midlevel providers to undergo 24 hours of training on opioid addiction treatment and be approved to treat patients.
Each provider will be allowed to treat 30 patients and, after one year, apply for another waiver that raises the limit to 100 patients. By comparison, doctors using a similar waiver were previously allowed to treat 100 patients and can now treat 275.
A news release said the rule came after “prodding from many working to combat the opiate epidemic,” including Shumlin, who advocated for the new rule with a group of governors in December and then in front of Congress in January.
“By allowing more medical professionals to prescribe these treatments, we will hopefully further reduce waitlists and get more Vermonters and Americans into recovery,” Shumlin said.
“It was absolutely crazy to many of us that we were allowing a wide variety of medical professionals to prescribe FDA-approved painkillers that we know can lead to a lifetime of addiction, while restricting who could help once addiction took hold,” Shumlin said.
