Expanding Interprofessional Teams: Training Future Health Care Professionals in Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT)

Introduction: Substance misuse persists and is undertreated across the United States (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2021). Further enhancing the skill sets and capacity of interprofessional members of primary care teams to include proficiency in the Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) model could help to alleviate the “treatment gap” (those requiring treatment, but not receiving it) by enhancing interprofessional teams at the pregraduate level (e.g., health educators, health coaches) to expand capacity and meet the volume of patients with substance use-related needs. Method: In this study, SBIRT knowledge, training satisfaction, and efficacy were evaluated among undergraduate and graduate health and behavioral health students before and after exposure to a series of online training modules. Results: On completion of the training, there were positive percent increases in overall mean knowledge and self-efficacy when compared with pretraining. At posttraining, graduate level students, regardless of discipline, reported greater knowledge than undergraduate students; there were no differences in efficacy or satisfaction among the groups. Additional analysis at the graduate level evaluated differences between behavioral health and medical trainees. No differences were found in knowledge or efficacy between groups at posttest, despite medical trainees reporting significantly lower efficacy at pretest. Discussion: The findings of this study reinforce the need and potential to incorporate SBIRT training into higher education curricula for interprofessional health care professions to begin expanding the integrated care team’s knowledge and efficacy in the provision of SBIRT to address the treatment gap.