ASU’s Center for Applied Behavioral Health Policy, which partners with UCLA, has received a $3.5 million federal grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The grant is a federal award that will be continued for five years. The award will help support the center with its ongoing efforts on the latest research, which is based on helping get information out faster on substance abuse treatment providers and other professionals.
“It’s going to help what they call the ‘research gap’ between the time it takes for research to come out about what works in treating substance abuse to actually having that new practice in wide-set use and treatment facilities,” grant co-director Michael Shafer said.
The Center for Applied Behavioral Health Policy within the College of Public Programs has been the primary partner of UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Programs for the past 10 years. UCLA handles the grant and will distribute it to ASU, as well as other universities and facilities.
“The money comes to us, and then we subcontract with ASU annually basically for them to cover for all the Arizona training and technical activities,” said Beth Rutkowski, the associate director of training/epidemiologist at UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Programs.
ASU has a part of the Pacific Southwest district of the Addiction Technology Transfer Center Network since 2001. ATTC provides hundreds of professional development opportunities focusing on recovery methods of treatment to practitioners, researchers, consumers and many others on a national scale.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Services Administration, a federal organization that gives grants to centers like ASU, launched ATTC in 1993. ATTC has 14 independent regional centers.
Arizona is part of Region 9, which also includes California. In the next five years, the region will expand to include Hawaii, Nevada, and six U.S.-affiliated Pacific island jurisdictions, Rutkowski said. The expansion of the region will assist professionals in bringing substance abuse treatment to people living in those areas.
“In addition to ASU handling Arizona-based activities, they are also going to be responsible for developing region-wide products, so they are broadening their scope to accommodate the full region,” Rutkowski said.
The biggest benefit of the ATTC money, moving forward, will help the regions prepare for the Affordable Care Act and shift focus from just having providers who do substance abuse treatment or providers that are primary care to having providers that can help with more than one issue, Rutkowski said.
“You go into a health facility and get care of all our conditions and not just one condition, so I think that is going to be the biggest benefit of the money in the next five years,” Rutkowski said.
The grant will also help with evidence-based practice, which is practice that has research backing it up in treating substance abuse and addiction, Shafer said.
“The work that we do in the center (is) focusing on training people to work in the fields and research on what works in the fields,” Shafer said. “Those four systems — mental health, substance abuse, child welfare and criminal justice — are the four systems where undiagnosed and untreated mental health illness and substance abuse occurred a lot.”
Vicki Staples, the Center for Applied Behavioral Health Policy associate director for clinical initiatives, said the grant would also help those in the workforce.
“One of the things we think about in this grant is really how do we prepare tomorrow’s workforce today,” Staples said.
The grant prepares people in the workforce before they enter the field or helps those already in the field continue their education, she said.
“We want to work collaboratively across all of those different service systems to provide education and training so that we can screen, provide early intervention, treatment and continuing care for those individuals,” Staples said.
Contact the reporter at chelsa.thomas@asu.edu
