Course Goals

The goals of EQIPP Substance Use – Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment course include:

• Familiarize pediatricians with AAP policy concerning substance use screening and intervention procedures.
• Introduce SBIRT concepts, terminology, and best practices for effective implementation.
• Help pediatricians create plans for improvement to address gaps identified in key clinical activities related to SBIRT. You will collect baseline and follow-up data as you work to improve care and processes through Plan, Do, Study, and Act (PDSA) cycles.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will able to:

• Recognize the importance of screening for substance use as part of routine health care and as needs arise to identify and treat individuals whose patterns of substance use put their health at risk.
• Identify and equip staff members to use validated screening tool(s) for adolescent substance use detection.
• Recognize the goal of a brief intervention to motivate patients to continue abstaining, or to stop/reduce using substances due to the negative health and safety effects of use.
• Provide general and substance-specific educational materials suitable for the age, health literacy, language, and culture of the practice’s patient/family population.
• Lead discussions to help patients who are using substances establish feasible, short-term behavior change goals.
• Recognize that patients with reported substance use who are unable to meet behavior change goals, have reported moderate or severe use, and/or significant psychiatric or medical comorbidities should ideally receive more intensive, specialized evaluation and care.
• Identify specialized adolescent substance use evaluation and/or treatment resources within the community and beyond to which you can refer patients needing more specialized care.
• Realize the pediatric medical home’s ongoing responsibility to support the recovery process and to help sustain treatment gains and prevent relapse. Schedule follow-up appointments with patients as indicated.

Quality Improvement:

• Measure and improve care delivery and processes for key clinical activities of substance use prevention, detection, assessment, and intervention by doing the following:
  • Collect and analyze baseline data to establish a starting point for improvement.
    • Identify 1 or more performance gaps in key clinical activities of care.
    • Create an improvement plan for closing identified gap(s) by clarifying the improvement idea to be tested:
      • AIM: What are we trying to improve or accomplish?
      • MEASURES: How will we know that a change made is an improvement?
      • CHANGES: What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
    • Test ideas quickly on a small scale to determine if changes lead to improvement.
    • Collect and analyze 2 follow-up data cycles to measure the results of the test.

Determine how to sustain successful changes to systematically integrate them into the practice’s culture, processes, and workflow.