Results from the National Alcohol and Other Drugs Educational Program for Social Work (ADEP)

BACKGROUND:  Results from the first national NIAAA funded Alcohol and Other Drugs Education Program (ADEP), designed to train social work faculty in alcohol and other drug (AOD) screening, assessment and treatment, showed significant gaps in knowledge and confidence of 50 social work faculty with respect to teaching AOD t in their graduate courses (Krull, et al. 2018, Lundgren et.al. 2018). These faculty reported that the key barrier to incorporating AOD content into their curriculum was lack of expertise in this area. Pre-post and six months tests showed significant increases in both faculty knowledge and confidence (Lundgren 2018, Lundgren forthcoming). We next examined if faculty increase in knowledge and confidence translated into teaching AOD content which resulted in students’ increase in knowledge. 

PURPOSE: We present baseline data from a pre-test survey conducted with 92 graduate students of faculty who participated in ADEP compared to a control group of 215 students on their AOD knowledge. In addition, student AOD knowledge compared to ADEP faculty AOD knowledge is compared at baseline.

METHODS: An online survey using Qualtrics software was sent to students (n=92) of the 50 ADEP faculty who taught an AOD course in the spring of 2018. The survey was also sent to a control group of students (n=215) of faculty who are scheduled to participate in ADEP in the future. 21 knowledge measures were responded to by students. These measures were identical to the measures which ADEP faculty responded to. Independent samples t-test was used to test the significance of the difference in knowledge between the two groups of students.

RESULTS: ADEP social work faculty reported significantly higher levels of knowledge than both student groups, except for medications used to treat AOD.

Both student groups and ADEP faculty demonstrated the lowest level of knowledge of screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment (SBIRT). Both student groups demonstrated the highest knowledge scores on alcohol use and the lowest knowledge scores on alcohol screening, alcohol treatment including both psycho-social and medication treatment. Students of ADEP participating faculty demonstrated significantly higher knowledge of DSM-5 diagnostic severity of AOD (p=.013; t (151.941)=-2.5010). These students also demonstrated higher knowledge of the role of self help groups in recovery (p=.008) t(141.603)=-2.693) and the maximum number of drinks for a healthy woman to be considered low risk (p=.019 t(136.644)=-2.375).

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE/POLICY: These baseline results from 307 students (Lundgren, 2018) indicate that graduate level social work students have low or little knowledge about evidence based screening, assessment and treatment of alcohol use disorder and other substance use disorders. This finding is also consistent with a study of another sample of 400 graduate level students receiving SBIRT training (Yeon 2017, Lundgren, 2018). Hence, it is critical that social work graduate schools revise their core curriculum to include AOD screening, assessment and treatment, given that a large majority of social workers in clinical practice encounter and directly work with clients with risky substance use or substance use disorder.