Literature Collection

SETTING: Alberta is a prairie province located in western Canada, with a population of approximately 4.3 million. In 2016, 363 Albertans died from apparent drug overdoses related to fentanyl, an opioid 50-100 times more toxic than morphine. This surpassed the number of deaths from motor vehicle collisions and homicides combined. INTERVENTION: Naloxone is a safe, effective, opioid antagonist that may quickly reverse an opioid overdose. In July 2015, a committee of community-based harm reduction programs in Alberta implemented a geographically restricted take-home naloxone (THN) program. The successes and limitations of this program demonstrated the need for an expanded, multi-sectoral, multi-jurisdictional response. The provincial health authority, Alberta Health Services (AHS), used previously established incident command system processes to coordinate implementation of a provincial THN program. OUTCOMES: Alberta's provincial THN program was implemented on December 23, 2015. This collaborative program resulted in a coordinated response across jurisdictional levels with wide geographical reach. Between December 2015 and December 2016, 953 locations, including many community pharmacies, registered to dispense THN kits, 9572 kits were distributed, and 472 reversals were reported. The provincial supply of THN kits more than tripled from 3000 to 10 000. IMPLICATIONS: Alberta was uniquely poised to deliver a large, province-wide, multi-sectoral and multi-jurisdictional THN program as part of a comprehensive response to increasing opioid-related morbidity and mortality. The speed at which AHS was able to roll out the program was made possible by work done previously and the willingness of multiple jurisdictions to work together to build on and expand the program.

BACKGROUND: In Belgium, 82% of the population consumes alcohol occasionally while 10% consume in a way that can be seen as problematic. On a European level, only 8% of the people who can be characterized as having Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) would have consulted professional assistance in the past year. In this context, the KCE (Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre) has addressed multiple recommendations to health professionals to reduce the "treatment gap" concerning the patients' care: (1) encourage screening and preventative interventions, (2) promote the acquirement of communicational and relational competences (3) develop collaborations between professionals. The objective of this article is to better understand their functioning. METHOD: We format a non-systematic literature review concerning these recommendations. RESULTS: The implementation of these Brief Interventions programs in primary care is relevant due to the moderately positive impact on the frequency and quantity of alcohol consumption but both the quality of the therapeutic relationship and collaboration with the care network would optimize Brief Interventions. The quality of the therapeutic relationship alone appears to have an impact on therapeutic outcome. CONCLUSION: Training concerning patient-professional relationship is necessary to maximize the effectiveness of BIs.

A Workforce Crisis. Across the nation there is a high degree of concern about the state of the behavioral health workforce and pessimism about its future. Workforce problems have an impact on almost every aspect of prevention and treatment across all sectors of the diverse behavioral health field. The issues encompass difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff, the absence of career ladders for employees, marginal wages and benefits, limited access to relevant and effective training, the erosion of supervision, a vacuum with respect to future leaders, and financing systems that place enormous burdens on the workforce to meet high levels of demand with inadequate resources. Most critically, there are significant concerns about the capability of the workforce to provide quality care. The majority of the workforce is uninformed about and unengaged in health promotion and prevention activities. Too many in the workforce also lack familiarity with resilience- and recovery-oriented practices and are generally reluctant to engage children, youth, and adults, and their families, in collaborative relationships that involve shared decision-making about treatment options. It takes well over a decade for proven interventions to make their way into practice, since prevention and treatment services are driven more by tradition than by science. The workforce lacks the racial diversity of the populations it serves and is far too often insensitive to the needs of individuals, as these are affected by ethnicity, culture, and language. In large sections of rural America, there simply is no mental health or addictions workforce.There is overwhelming evidence that the behavioral health workforce is not equipped in skills or in numbers to respond adequately to the changing needs of the American population. While the incidence of co-occurring mental and addictive disorders among individuals has increased dramatically, most of the workforce lacks the array of skills needed to assess and treat persons with these co-occurring conditions.Training and education programs largely have ignored the need to alter their curricula to address this problem and, thus, the nation continues to prepare new members of the workforce who simply are underprepared from the moment they complete their training.