Impact of Continuing Care on Recovery from Substance Use Disorder

Course overview

This course is based upon material published in the Alcohol Research current reviews and is available as an open-access article. Continuing care is widely believed to be an important component of effective treatment for substance use disorder, particularly for those individuals with greater problem severity. The purpose of this review was to examine the research literature on continuing care for alcohol and drug use disorders, including studies that addressed efficacy, moderators, mechanisms of action, and economic impact. This narrative review first considered findings from prior reviews (published through 2014), followed by a more detailed examination of studies published more recently. The review found that research has generally supported the efficacy of continuing care for both adolescents and adults, but the picture is complex. Reviews find relatively small effects when results from individual studies are combined. However, continuing care of longer duration that includes more active efforts to keep patients engaged may produce more consistently positive results. Moreover, patients at higher risk for relapse may benefit to a greater degree from continuing care. Several newer approaches for the provision of continuing care show promise. These include incentives for abstinence and automated mobile health interventions to augment more conventional counselor-delivered interventions. Primary care can be used to provide medications for opioid and alcohol use disorders over extended periods, although more research is needed to determine the optimal mix of behavioral treatments and other psychosocial services in this setting. Regardless of the intervention selected for use, the status of most patients will change and evolve over time, and interventions need to include provisions to assess patients on a regular basis and to change or adapt treatment when warranted This course on continuing care is designed for social workers, professional counselors, psychologists, nurses, and substance abuse counselors, who do clinical work. In addition, this course is appropriate for beginning, intermediate and advanced level practitioners who wish to develop their knowledge of continuing care. The course material includes a literature review of mindfulness-based relapse prevention. It may also be useful for licensed clinicians who require continuing clinical education courses for license renewal. The course is based on a journal article that includes research. It contains statistical analysis and data that some clinicians enjoy reading and others do not. A significant benefit of reading research-based articles for continuing education is they provide practitioners with the latest findings in their field. Authors: McKay Learning Objectives: This course will provide the practitioner with detailed information regarding continuing care. Specifically, a professional will: Describe how care management in primary care can be used to manage SUDs Identify important functions of continuing care in the recovery process Distinguish between the efficacy of telephone continuing care between SUD and AUD patients Citation: McKay, J. R. (2021). Impact of continuing care on recovery from substance use disorder. Alcohol research: current reviews, 41(1).