Interventions Implemented By Partnerships for Success Community Subrecipients

Introduction:

Alcohol use remains the most prevalent form of substance use by youth in the United States, while prescription drug misuse and abuse emerged as an epidemic more recently.  In 2012, about 25% of teens reported misusing or abusing prescription drugs in their lifetime, while about 24% of youth age 12 to 20 reported drinking alcohol in the past month.   Under SAMHSA’s Strategic Prevention Framework Partnerships for Success (SPF-PFS) program, state, jurisdiction, and tribal grantees fund organizations in subrecipient communities to address the problems of underage drinking and prescription drug misuse.  This presentation describes the interventions implemented by PFS subrecipient organizations to reduce underage drinking and prescription drug misuse/abuse along with efforts to count and categorize those interventions and assess their reach.  

 

Methods:

Approximately 610 organizations funded to implement interventions in subrecipient communities will complete an online Community Level Instrument (CLI-R) in which they describe their organization’s progress through the SPF (assessment, planning, capacity building, implementation, and evaluation).  The CLI-R collects extensive information on intervention implementation including targets, activities, costs, adaptations, and demographics of those reached by or participating in the intervention.  As part of this data collection, subrecipient community organizations categorize the interventions by service type, CSAP strategy type (community based process, prevention education, alternative activities, problem identification and referral, environmental strategy, and information dissemination), Institute of Medicine (IOM) category (universal direct/indirect, selective, and indicated), and ecological target.

 

Results and Discussion:

In their first year, subrecipients of grantees initially funded in 2012 implemented environmental strategies more than any other CSAP strategy type, representing 40% of implemented interventions.  However subrecipient communities often implemented multiple CSAP strategy types in combination.  The most commonly implemented service type was preventing underage alcohol sales, with subrecipients also commonly implementing media campaigns, health promotions and environmental policy interventions.  Most PFS interventions focused on universal populations, with few focusing on selective or indicated populations. A future focus on counting reach will play a vital role in assessing the availability of prevention interventions to demographic groups who face health disparities, important information for new SAMHSA policy initiatives related to ACA requirements.