SBIRT-X - The Miami Dade College (MDC) Medical Campus will implement the SBIRT Student Training Expansion (SBIRT-X) project. The project will revise and update curriculum in programs of the MDC School of Health Sciences and the MDC Benjamín León School of Nursing to include substance use disorder (SUD) content focused on alcohol, marijuana, stimulants, and the growing problem posed by opioids. Over the two-year project period, SBIRT-X will engage and train 1,722 health professions students and 385 teaching faculty members from nine programs that train public-facing professionals: Nursing, Dental Hygiene, Emergency Medical Services, Emergency Medical Technician, Health Information Management, Medical Assisting, Paramedic, Physical Therapy Assistant, and Physician Assistant Studies.
Eight lead faculty members from the School of Health Sciences and School of Nursing will lead the curriculum revision for their respective disciplines, adapting SAMHSA’s screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) model to the needs of MDC’s predominantly minority, low-income student body and service area. Students are more than 60% Hispanic; nearly 24% black, non-Hispanic; and 56% low-income, with 38% living below the poverty level.
The MDC Medical Campus continues to be one of the top ten providers in the nation of degrees awarded in the health professions. The MDC School of Nursing is the largest pre-licensure nursing program in the United States. More than 40% of all registered nurses in Miami-Dade County are MDC School of Nursing graduates, with more than 20,000 graduates over the past 50 years. A current enrollment snapshot of the targeted disciplines reflects over 1,151 students in nursing programs, 99 in dental hygiene, 30 in emergency medical services, 171 in emergency medical technician, 20 in health information management, 27 in medical assisting, 100 in paramedic, 69 in physical therapist assistant, and 55 in physician assistant studies.
SBIRT-X project goals are to (1) train, deploy, and support a multidisciplinary health care workforce that is competent in the use of an integrated approach to identifying, intervening, and referring for treatment persons at risk of alcohol, marijuana, stimulant, opioid, and other substance use or mental health issues; (2) develop a cadre of SUD faculty-trained champions from academia and health profession students that can impact policy change supportive of expanded use of SUD education and integration of behavioral health across all levels of health care systems at the community, regional, and statewide levels; and (3) implement a SUD training model that can be effectively replicated with ethnically diverse student populations at educational institutions nationwide, including other two-year colleges.
To achieve these goals, SBIRT-X has developed the following project objectives:
1. By April 2021, lead faculty on the SUD committee, under the guidance of a co-principal investigators and the project director, will revise and deliver curriculum in the nine targeted disciplines to incorporate SUD content and will train 75% of 385 participating faculty and 1,722 participating students on the SUD curriculum.
2. By April 2022, the lead and trained faculty from the targeted disciplines will collaborate to refine, deliver to 90% of the targeted students and faculty, and assess the revised curriculum.
3. By April 2022, the project team will reach out to at least 75% of the licensing and certifying bodies for the targeted disciplines to promote the incorporation of SUD in their respective licensing examinations.
