Risky drinking and alcohol problems often remain unidentified in patients in medical settings. When alcohol treatment is needed, minorities are less likely to receive it. Although brief valid screening tools exist, and brief interventions have proven efficacy they are not being implemented routinely or universally. While educational interventions can increase screening and intervention, and while health professional curricula address alcohol and culture, race and ethnicity separately, they are not being used widely for physicians-in training. Curricula tailored to primary care physicians that address both alcohol problems and healthdisparities in an integrated fashion, and that are actively disseminated are needed. In this Alcohol Clinical Training (ACT) Education Project, the overall aim is to disseminate research-derived information and pragmatic clinical skills to increase screening and brief intervention for alcohol problems with attention to health disparities.
The specific aims are: 1) to develop a model alcohol and health disparity training curriculum, implement the training with clinicians and key influential faculty nationwide, and actively disseminate it via the worldwide web; and 2) to actively disseminate research-derived evidence on alcohol and health, integrating health disparities, via a newsletter, Alcohol and Health: Current Evidence. The curriculum will highlight research-derived findings and recommendations, be tailored to be effective for generalist physicians, and be developed with attention to health disparities and adult learning principles. The newsletter, based on successful publications on medical topics for practicing physicians, will provide an additional teaching tool for faculty, be useful to practicing clinicians, and raise the visibility of alcohol problems for generalist physicians. As an integral means to implementation of the specific aims, general medicine physician fellows will focus on alcohol problems and health disparities for mentored research and education projects, and will participate in curriculum and newsletter implementation. As a result they will be encouraged to focus potentially influential academic careers on these topics. The ACT Project will produce an integrated curriculum that addresses alcohol problems and health disparities tailored for generalist physicians, and actively disseminate research-derived evidence in a timely fashion to a new target audience--generalist physicians.
| Bertholet, Nicolas; Dukes, Kim; Horton, Nicholas J et al. (2009) Factor structure of the SOCRATES questionnaire in hospitalized medical patients. Addict Behav 34:568-72 |
| Alford, Daniel P; Richardson, Jessica M; Chapman, Sheila E et al. (2008) A web-based Alcohol Clinical Training (ACT) curriculum: is in-person faculty development necessary to affect teaching? BMC Med Educ 8:11 |
| Saitz, Richard (2007) Screening and brief intervention enter their 5th decade. Subst Abus 28:3-6 |
