Student University of Houston Houston, Texas, United States
Overview: Evidence-based practices (EBPs) are becoming a major policy goal in the healthcare industry, both nationally and internationally. Many professions have adopted EBPs as the gold standard of policy. However, efforts to comprehensively identify barriers and facilitators to the dissemination of clinically sound practices in the Latino community are lacking.Proposal text: Growing attention has been paid to the adoption and successful implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in clinical settings (Stadnick et al., 2020). However, the development, adoption, and implementation of effective, mental-health EBPs geared toward improving outcomes among diverse communities and populations have been limited. Findings of a cross-sectional study of Puerto Rican mental health providers (Nf237) and their attitudes towards EBPs will be presented. A four-domain approach that included EBP appeal, EBP requirements, openness to innovation, and perceived divergence from research-informed practices was utilized. Specific concepts pertaining to provider attitudes toward EBP were regressed across a variety of individual demographic factors (i.e., age, gender, salary, number of jobs, years of experience, levels of burnout, levels of education, type of degree-conferring university (public/private), discipline (social workers: n = 45.6%; psychologists: 29.1%; and professional counselors: 25.3%), and work setting (clinical: n = 33.8%; school: n = 39.3%; community: 26.9%)). Moreover, this study examined whether perceived organizational support and agency type (private or public) were associated with mental-health professionals’ favorable attitudes toward EBPs. All variables were entered into IBM SPSS Version 25.0 (IBM Corp., 2017) and Mplus8 to prepare the structural regression models. Data were collected from October to December 2021 for the proposed study. All variables were examined for the accuracy of data entry, missing data, normal distributions, and outliers. Overall, the sample was predominately female (83.4%) and Puerto Rican (96.2%). The mean age was 43 years. More than half of the sample reported having a master’s degree (62.9%), followed by a doctorate degree (37.1%). Most participants ought their degrees from private (78.1%) and public (18.1%) institutions. More than half of the sample (56.1%) reported being trained in EBPs, and (50.6%) had no knowledge on how to access EBP-related resources. A significant negative correlation between perceived organizational support and emotional exhaustion of -0.521 was found, suggesting that as Perceived Organizational Support increase, emotional exhaustion in the workplace decreases. Moreover, a significant negative correlation was observed between the EBP openness subscale and burnout, with a correlation of -0.15, indicating a small effect size (p = 0.019, 95.00% CI = [-0.27, -0.02]). This may suggest that as openness to EBP increases, MBI scores tend to decrease. Preliminary findings of the structural regression indicate that the female gender predicts openness to EBPs (p = 0.001), whereas an older age may predict greater divergence from research (p = 0.016). Meanwhile, working at a private agency (p = 0.036) and being educated at a private institution (p = 0.038) were found to predict lower scores on the appeal of EBPs and their requirements, respectively. The proposed presentation seeks to expand current knowledge of individual and organizational predictors of favorable EBP attitudes across three mental-health-related PR disciplines and explain differences identified.
Learning Objectives:
Upon completion, participants will be able to identify the importance of promoting competencies and skills related to EBP engagement, particularly among students who may experience greater levels of divergence from research results with lower openness to innovative practice scores.
Upon completion, participants will have a more detailed and nuanced understanding of individual and organizational predictors of mental-health professional’s attitudes toward EBPs among a diverse sample of Latino mental-health providers in Puerto Rico.
Upon completion, participants will be able to identify barriers and facilitators to the effective dissemination and implementation of EBPs in clinical and non-clinical settings.