The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health, today announced it has awarded 7 grants to develop new and different ways of training and supervising community-based drug addiction therapists. The grants total $8.1 million over a period of 5 years.
"Despite the availability of numerous effective behavioral therapies for people with drug-abuse problems, established research-based treatments have not been adopted widely in clinical practice," says Dr. Nora D. Volkow, NIDA Director. "New methods are needed to enhance community treatment providers' knowledge and skills to administer behavioral treatments with some evidence of efficacy for treatment of drug abuse and intervention for HIV/AIDS risk reduction."
The studies funded through these grants will blend knowledge, theory, and technology and offer the next generation of addiction treatment professionals creative ways to overcome the barriers to adapting and adopting new research-based treatments.
Some examples that are directly applicable to the design of effective training and learning methods include: knowledge of the facets of cognition that are directly relevant to how people learn; technological advances that offer ways to standardize training and make it available to more people; and virtual reality applications that may facilitate the development and practice of skills without harming patients.
The grantees are:
- Nancy M. Petry, University of Connecticut, Storrs, $1,809,845.00 over 5 years
Training Therapists to Administer Contingency Management.
DA 16855-01 - Edward V. Nunes, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York City, $1,456,212.00 over 4 years
MI Training: Live Supervision by Teleconference.
DA 16950-01 - Howard A. Liddle, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, $1,511,395.00 over 4 years
Training Clinicians in Empirically-based Family Therapy.
DA 16969-01 - Steve Martino, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, $684,600.00 over 3 years
Training Strategies for Motivational Interviewing.
DA 16970-01 - Mary J. Larson, New England Research Institutes, Watertown, Massachusetts, $1,682,029.00 over 5 years
E-Technology to Enhance Addiction Counselor Helping.
DA 16929-01 - Bentson H. McFarland, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, $151,000.00 over 2 years
Standardized Patients as Drug Abuse Treatment Clients.
DA 16958-01 - Diane E. Sholomskas, Applied Behavioral Research, New Haven, Connecticut, $774,000.00 over 3 years
Randomized Trial of Novel Approaches to CBT Training.
DA 16987-01
NIDA also recently established the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN), which was created to conduct rigorous, multisite, clinical trials of various types of treatments in community settings and with diversified patient populations. A second mission of the CTN is to transfer these science-based research results quickly to practitioners and their patients.