Family support and treatment completion for unhealthy alcohol use in a SBIRT program

ABSTRACT

Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) research indicates that substance use severity is a predictor of readiness to change, which is in turn associated with positive treatment follow-through. Using a strengths-based approach, family support is hypothesized to be a protective factor related to treatment completion; yet additional research is needed to substantiate the role of this construct when considering other pre-treatment factors. This study used a SEM equation to examine whether self-reported family support mediated the relationship between substance use severity and treatment completion. Service user demographics and pre-treatment characteristics were collected from service users in a primary care setting who were referred to treatment in a statewide implementation of SBIRT. The results provide additional evidence that family support mediates the relationship between symptom severity and substance use treatment completion. The authors conclude with a discussion on how family support can be integrated in SBIRT models for both enhancing the screening process and referrals to treatment.

KEYWORDS:

• Alcohol use disorder
• AUDIT
• family support
• primary care SBIRT
• structural equation modeling
• treatment completion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research study uses data from the ‘AL-SBIRT: Screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment in Alabama’ project, which is supported with funding from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA; T10026659].