Under this RFA, the Richmond Behavioral Health Authority's (RBHA) Substance Abuse Services Division will partner with the Virginia Commonwealth University's Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies (VCU-IDAS) and the RBHA's contracted community-based substance abuse treatment providers to develop and pilot test a program self-assessment protocol for practice improvement. Through this project, the RBHA and its university-based partners will assess organizational readiness and capacity for practice improvement of specific program units of the RBHA as well as its affiliated network of contracted treatment providers. In the context of the current national """"""""research-to-practice"""""""" movement, the RBHA and VCU will increase and improve the dialogue between university-based research faculty and the RBHA's community-based practitioners. This preliminary, descriptive research will provide the information needed to conduct a planned series of program-specific interventions, designed to expedite the adoption of EBPs within specific programs. This initiative will contribute to the emerging literature on factors that facilitate or hinder the adoption and implementation of new practice technologies with regard to community-based care for prevention and treatment of drug abuse, particularly overcoming health care disparities for minorities, a large segment of Richmond's population. Additionally, this project will support a culture change process wherein local service providers become more data-driven in the design and delivery of services. The current study will be grounded in a stage model of innovation implementation widely advanced in the organizational change literature (Klein &Sorra, 1996;Rogers, 1995;Wejnert, 2002) and applied by Simpson and colleagues to substance abuse service delivery systems (Simpson, 2002;Lehman, Greener, &Simpson, 2002).
Specific aims : 1) Develop a pilot protocol for community-based substance abuse treatment provider self-assessment that will serve as the basis for systemic program assessment, 2) Using results of the self-assessment protocol, develop a pilot treatment practice improvement protocol that can serve as a basis for systemic practice improvement, 3) Implement the program assessment and practice improvement pilot protocols in selected service units within Richmond community-based treatment programs and assess their impacts on evidence-based practice implementation and organizational functioning and 4) Promote systemic implementation of the self-assessment and practice improvement protocol, assess replicability for use in other areas, and disseminate findings to inform other national technology transfer efforts.
