• David K Duong, Patricia S O'Sullivan, Derek D Satre, Philippa Soskin, and Jason Satterfield.
• a Department of Emergency Medicine , University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine , San Francisco , California , USA.
• Teach Learn Med. 2016 Jul 1; 28 (3): 303-13.

ProblemResidency education is challenged by a shortage of personnel and time, particularly for teaching behavioral interventions such as screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) to reduce hazardous drinking and drug use. However, social workers may be well placed to teach SBIRT in clinical training settings.InterventionWe describe a curriculum with social workers as SBIRT trainers of emergency medicine (EM) residents during actual clinical shifts in an EM residency training program. The curriculum required 1 EM faculty member working with social workers and 1 additional hour of formal residency conference teaching time.ContextWe implemented the curriculum at both a university tertiary care hospital emergency department and a county trauma center. We trained 8 social workers at both sites as SBIRT superusers to teach and assess EM resident SBIRT performance with actual patients. We measured the length and number of sessions to attain SBIRT competence, residents' satisfaction, and resident comments (coded by authors).OutcomeFive of the 8 social workers trained residents between June 2013 and May 2014, 31 EM residents trained to a level indicating SBIRT competence with 114 patients. Each patient interaction averaged 8.8 minutes and residents averaged 3.13 patients. Twenty-four (77%) residents gave ratings of 1.58 (SD = .58) for the quality of teaching, 2.33 (SD = .87) for recommending the training to a colleague, 1.38 (SD = .49) for superusers' knowledge, 1.88 (SD = .95) for usefulness of instruction, 1.54 (SD = .72) for workplace learning, and 1.58 (SD = .78) for valuing learning from social workers (on a scale of 1 [very satisfied/strongly agree] to 5 [very dissatisfied/strongly disagree]). Residents preferred learning SBIRT during the 1st and 2nd training years and in the workplace.Lessons LearnedSocial work colleagues can be effective in teaching SBIRT to residents in the workplace, and our residents highly valued learning from social workers, who all had prior training in motivational interviewing. In the implementation of this curriculum, the clinical demands of residents must be taken into account when teaching occurs, and having multiple social worker instructors was instrumental.

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