Session: Evaluating Samhsa's Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) Efforts to Reduce Prescription Drug Misuse and Underage Drinking in Communities (Society for Prevention Research 23rd Annual Meeting)

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Strategic Prevention Framework Partnerships for Success (SPF-PFS) program funds grantees to address two key substance abuse prevention priorities: underage drinking and prescription drug misuse. The Program Evaluation for Prevention Contract (PEP-C) cross-site evaluation documents and assesses the effectiveness of the SPF-PFS approach, which includes 5 steps for prevention: Assessment, Planning, Capacity Building, Implementation, and Evaluation.   Within the three cohorts included in the evaluation (2012, 2013, and 2014), SPF-PFS reached 40 states, 6 U.S. territories, 5 tribal organizations and the District of Columbia at the grantee level, along with approximately 610 subrecipient organizations funded by grantees to implement interventions in their communities.

The first presentation in this symposia will provide an overview of the PFS program and related evaluation design, and describe the states, jurisdictions, tribes and communities participating in PFS. The second presentation will describe interventions implemented by PFS grantees to reduce underage drinking and prescription drug misuse/abuse along with efforts to count and categorize those interventions and assess their reach.   The final presentation will discuss innovative data analytic solutions to challenges posed by the evaluation of the program, including the use of comparison communities, propensity score weighting, data harmonization, meta-regression, cost effectiveness models, and qualitative comparative analysis.   This evaluation explicitly addresses the 2015 SPR Conference theme of Integrating Prevention Science and Public Policy in that findings will directly inform best practices and funding decisions on underage alcohol use and prescription drug misuse prevention at the Federal (SAMHSA), state and local levels.  It specifically examines what intervention types and combinations are associated with outcomes along with the cost effectiveness of these types and combinations of interventions.  The SPF PFS evaluation will provide a study of which strategies communities use to successfully scale programs up in real world settings, as well as the challenges states, territories, tribal organizations and communities face in this process. In addition to presenting findings from the first year of the evaluation, the major purpose of this presentation will be to solicit input from other prevention researchers on this evaluation which will have a major impact on prevention policy and funding decisions across the United States and U.S.