Rehabilitation science graduate students’ attitudes toward working with people at risk for substance use disorders

Research Objectives: To evaluate graduate occupational therapy and counseling students’ attitudes toward treating individuals at risk for substance use disorders (SUD) before and after Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment-Plus (SBIRT-Plus), a didactic and standardized patient simulation training. We hypothesized that students’ attitudes toward individuals at risk for SUDs would improve after training.

Design: One-group pretest-posttest study design.

Setting: Academic setting

Participants: Our sample included 90 students from rehabilitation science graduate programs.

Interventions: The SBIRT-Plus training teaches universal screenings for identifying individuals at risk for substance use disorders, providing harm reduction brief interventions, and /or making referrals as necessary. The SBIRT-Plus training includes twelve modules to inform students about alcohol, opioid, and methamphetamine drug use.

Main Outcome Measures: We administered the Alcohol and Alcohol Perceptions Questionnaire (AAPPQ) and the Drug and Drug Perceptions Questionnaire (DDPPQ) pre- and post-training. Each questionnaire includes six subscales: role adequacy, legitimacy, and support (prepared to work with, responsibility to intervene, and support from colleagues), task specific self-esteem (confidence), motivation, and work satisfaction. We compared pre-post scores with SPSS (v.28) software using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with an alpha of .05.

Results: Students’ responses on five of six of the AAPPQ and DDPPQ subscales moved in the positive direction, with significant changes in role adequacy, role legitimacy, role support, task self-esteem, and work satisfaction. Students’ motivation for working with individuals at risk for alcohol use disorders did not improve (p=.252, AAPPQ); however, motivation for working with individuals at risk for drug use disorders was significantly more positive after training (p=.044, DDPPQ).

Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate improved attitudes toward working with people at risk for SUD. This is consistent with prior studies of traditional SBIRT that showed positive improvement on all AAPPQ and DDPPQ subscales, except for the motivation subscale. The current study provides evidence that SBIRT-Plus is effective in increasing rehabilitation science graduate students’ positive attitudes toward individuals at risk for a SUD.

Author(s) Disclosures: All authors declare no disclosures.