Distance Versus On-Site Educational Strategies for Competency-Based Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment Education

Abstract

Background: Although the individual and public health consequences of alcohol and drug use are substantial, nursing education programs generally lack content on addiction. The goal of this evaluation was to compare the initial outcomes of on-site versus distance methods for training graduate nurse practitioner students in Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) for substance use. Method: A nonrandomized two-group pretest–posttest design was used to compare knowledge, attitudes, and skills learning outcomes between on-site (n = 45) and distance (n = 18) family or adult/geriatric Master of Science in Nursing nurse practitioner students receiving SBIRT training. Results: Overall, students increased their knowledge, attitudes, and confidence about screening and intervening with patients who use substances; showed a high level of skills in conducting a brief intervention to motivate patients to reduce their substance use; and were highly satisfied with the education provided. Counseling confidence and gains in knowledge were similar across groups. Compared with distance students, on-site students reported significantly more positive attitudes about their role adequacy, role legitimacy, and role support for intervening with alcohol use and about their role support for intervening with drug use. On-site students had greater training satisfaction, but distance students’ skills assessed through standardized patient interactions were significantly better. Conclusions: Both on-site and distance training were effective instructional methods to increase SBIRT knowledge and skills. However, differences in attitudes, training satisfaction, and skills demonstration should be taken into account when designing addiction training using distance technologies.

The Status of SBIRT Training in Health Professions Education: A Cross-Discipline Review and Evaluation of SBIRT Curricula and Educational Research

“…Of the 1,856 articles identified in the initial search (after duplicate were removed), 95 met our inclusion criteria, 42–136 the earliest of which was published in 2007. 48 Figure 1 shows the flowchart of the literature search and Supplemental Digital Appendix 3 at http://links.lww.com/ACADMED/B249 provides a summary of each of the included articles.…”

Internet-Based Learning for Professionals in Addiction Psychiatry: A Scoping Review

“…[21][22][23][24][25][26] These included surveys with short-answer questions or interviews along with quantitative measures and studies that compared a web-based curriculum with controls. 21,23,27,28 Pretest/ posttest design was a common mode of the study of the effectiveness of online teaching. Other studies included randomized controlled trials and prospective observational and descriptive studies.…”

The effectiveness of a web-based education program for nurses’ self-assessed skills concerning the care of alcohol-intoxicated patients in an emergency department

“…providing comprehensive continuing education in this area the quality of patient care could be improved [8,18,20,21]. It is important that ED nursing staff have this kind of knowledge and skills because ED is often the first health care facility that risk users attend [4].…”

“…The idea of SBIRT is that it helps nurses and doctors recognize substance abuse and understand what to do after that. Web-based programs have also shown good effectiveness in improving nursing staffs' skills in SBIRT use compared to their skills before attending this kind of education [2,14,16,20,22].…”

“…The effectiveness of web-based education on substance abuse nursing has been tested, especially when updating primary healthcare professionals' knowledge and skills. According to the results of earlier studies, knowledge and skills concerning some aspects of substance abuse nursing have improved [14,19,20,25,26]. However, these educations have been quite limited in scope and have not focused widely on the skills to care for alcoholintoxicated patients or the ED context.…”