Effectiveness of Motivational Interviewing Supervision in Community Programs

Study Summary

The virtual requirement that substance abuse programs use evidence-based treatments (EBT) has prompted the development of dissemination strategies to promote EBT technology transfer. Implementation research, clinical trial training methods, and clinician training studies suggest that clinical supervision that involves direct observation, fidelity rating-based feedback, and coaching of therapeutic skills is a promising dissemination approach. However, clinical supervision delivered within substance abuse programs by on-site supervisors has never been directly tested in a randomized controlled trial to determine the impact of supervision on both clinician EBT skills and client treatment outcomes. Recent results from two NIDA CTN protocols testing the effectiveness of Motivational Interviewing (MI) have shown that community program clinicians can learn to deliver MI with fidelity when receiving MI supervision from their program supervisors after workshop training and that their implementation of MI early in treatment improves client retention and primary substance use outcomes. A MI supervision manual called MIA: STEP (Motivational Interviewing Assessment: Supervisory Tools for Enhancing Proficiency) was developed from these protocols and has begun to be widely distributed by NIDA in partnership with SAMHSA for community program use. The effectiveness of the MIA: STEP supervision approach is unknown. This study will directly test the effectiveness of MIA: STEP supervision on clinician MI fidelity and on client outcomes by randomly assigning 60 clinicians and 420 substance-using outpatients from 11 community programs within Connecticut to one of two conditions in which clinicians in both conditions will deliver a 1-session MI intervention to clients as the enter treatment. The conditions are: 1) workshop training plus MIA: STEP supervision, and 2) workshop training alone with supervision-as-usual practices used at each program. This project will be the first randomize

Primary Outcome

The main outcome for the client participant trial is program retention at 4-week and 12-week followups after having received a 1-session intake. Program retention is defined as the the percent days of program attendances (days attended/# days scheduled) and percent sessions attended (sessions attended/# sessions scheduled) verified by administrative record and interview with clinical staff

Interventions

• BEHAVIORAL SAU
• BEHAVIORAL MIA: STEP