Training the trainers: substance abuse screening and intervention.

Full Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Screening and brief intervention for substance abuse is effective yet underutilized by primary care physicians. This article reports on Project SAEFP (Substance Abuse Education for Family Physicians), which aimed to enhance the clinical and teaching skills and activities of U.S. family practice residency faculty. METHOD: Ten five-day workshops were designed and administered for 165 participants. Evaluation data included measures of participant satisfaction and pre-workshop and twelve-month post-workshop measures of the frequency of teaching, consulting, and clinical activities, and the attainment of self-identified teaching goals. RESULTS: The participants were very satisfied with the workshops. They improved significantly in the key outcome measures. CONCLUSIONS: Several workshops may have contributed to the apparent success of Project SAEFP. Attributes of the workshops which might have facilitated their success were their duration, funding, frequency of offering, collegial learning environment, opportunities for active learning, emotionally moving exposure to recovering individuals, focus on how to modify curriculum at participant residency programs, availability of family physician role models as faculty, and readily usable instructional materials. Planners of interventions for physician educators might profit from similar attention to these attributes.

Author information

Author/s: Brown, R L (RL); Fleming, M F (MF);

Affiliation: Department of Family Medicine, University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison 53715, USA.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: International journal of psychiatry in medicine (Int J Psychiatry Med), published in UNITED STATES. (Language: eng)

Reference: 1998-; vol 28 (issue 1) : pp 137-46

Dates: Created 1998/08/07; Completed 1998/08/07; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 9617653, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

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