February Newsletter
Strategic Prevention Framework Overview
This month as we begin the first of the 2020 Partnerships for Success (PFS) Academy webinar series on the Strategic Prevention Framework, we’ll highlight tools and resources related to working each of these steps as well as integrating sustainability and cultural competency in each step. Dr. Iris Smith has emphasized each area of the SPF and the role of the epidemiologist at each step in the article at the bottom of this newsletter. Research and data findings drive this process, and she demonstrates that close work with your epi and evaluation teams are just as important as developing community partnerships at all levels of the SPF.

If you plan to attend the PFS Academy beginning this month, a great resource to begin with is - A Guide to SAMHSA’s Strategic Prevention Framework. The principles in this tool outline the webinar series in the PFS Academy. The document provides a deeper look into each step with appendices providing a information on topics such as risk and protective factors, the socio-ecological model, and sound data collection and evaluation practices.

Please join our mailing list for announcements about additional resources; including podcasts, webinar recordings and the most updated information on each step as it becomes available. If you haven’t already, please register for the PFS Academy. Registration is filling up quickly .

Additional Resources

Prevention Technology Transfer Center Network
This site is filled with various SAMHSA resources to assist preventionists at various steps of the SPF and throughout the process.
 
Evidence-Based Practices Resource Center
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
The Evidence Based Practices Resource Center provides communities, clinicians, policy-makers and others with the information and tools to incorporate evidence-based practices into their communities or clinical settings.

YouTube Video: Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) Overview
DCCCA Communication, August 2019
This 10-minute video provides an overview of the Strategic Prevention Framework, a process plan for preventing substance misuse.

Principles of Substance Abuse Prevention for Early Childhood
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
This guide, intended for parents, practitioners, and policymakers, begins with a list of 7 principles addressing the specific ways in which early interventions can have positive effects on development; these principles reflect findings on the influence of intervening early with vulnerable populations on the course of child development and on common elements of successful early childhood programs.

Tools to Address Health Disparities
South Southwest Prevention Technology Transfer Center
This site includes steps to completing your Behavioral Health Disparities Impact Statement, with examples from other states, checklists, templates and other useful tools.

Healthy People 2020
Office of Disease Prevention and HealthPromotion
 
Use these Healthy People tools and resources to learn more about Healthy People and help improve health in your community. You can
What's Happening Around the Region?
Training and Events
Webinar Series: PFS Academy 2020: Making the Steps of the Strategic Prvention Framework Work for You

Each webinar will begin 8:00 PT/9:00 MT/10:00 CT/11:00 ET

The Mid America PTTC, in collaboration with the South Southwest PTTC, will be offering a seven-part webinar series on the SPF beginning in February.

SAMHSA’s Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) provides practitioners with comprehensive guidance to more effectively address substance misuse and related behavioral health problems in their communities. This seven-part webinar series will explore this five-step, data-driven process to identify genuine prevention needs, build capacity and plans to address those needs, implement effective programs and interventions, and evaluate and continually improve prevention efforts.

At each step of the SPF, and in separate sessions, practitioners will learn to incorporate the guiding principles of cultural competence and sustainability to help support the implementation of SAMHSA’s Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF). 

Certificates for prevention hours will be available upon registration and completion of the webinar.

Each webinar will begin at 10:00 AM CST

 
  • March 24, Part 2: Capacity Building, will guide participants through the process of improving community readiness and increasing the resources available to address prevention efforts.
 
 
  • May 19, Part 4: Implementation, will provide participants with the tools needed to implement prevention programs, policies, and practices with fidelity and effectiveness.
 
  • June 23, Part 5: Evaluation, will offer helpful guides for the collection and analysis of prevention strategies and teach participants how to modify programming for future enhanced results.
 
  • July 21, Part 6: Sustainability, will provide participants with the elements of a sustainable prevention program and how to integrate sustainability into each step of the SPF.

Drug Endangered Children: March Peer Sharing Call

Date: March 12, 2020
Time: 1:00 CT

Please join us for our quarterly drug endangered children's peer sharing call. We will be joined by Eric Nation and Stacee Read from the  National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children.
Listen to our most recent podcast!

Podcast Episode 23: New England Prevention Technology Transfer Center and Marijuana toolkit
 
PTTC Network Launches New Marijuana Prevention and Education Toolkit -
This podcast is a discussion with Scott Gagnon from the New England PTTC.
Scott is a Certified Prevention Specialist and the Director of AdCare Educational Institute of Maine, Inc., and Director of the New England Prevention Technology Transfer Center. Scott has a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service. Appointed by the Maine Speaker of the House, Scott serves as the public health representative on Maine’s Marijuana Advisory Commission. Scott chairs the marijuana prevention advocacy and education group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, Maine and has also served as Co-Chair of the Prevention Task Force for the Maine Opiate Collaborative. Scott recently served on the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) National Advisory Council. In addition to his role as Director for the New England PTTC, Scott has been a marijuana science trainer for the New England Addiction Technology Transfer Center.

Scott has received numerous awards, including the Patrick J. Kennedy Outstanding Advocate Award from Smart Approaches to Marijuana in 2017. Scott trains and presents both in New England and nationally on marijuana science and policy, as well as on opioid prevention and prevention workforce development. 

In this podcast, he shares the work of the New England PTTC and his work for the national PTTC marijuana work group.
Free Self-guided Learning Courses

  • **New** Informing Prevention: Understanding Adolescent Development (Part 1 of 6)
  • Today's Marijuana: Stronger, More Edibles, Confusing Information About Driving
  • Introduction to Substance Abuse Prevention: Understanding the Basics
  • Marijuana
  • E-Cigarettes and Vaping
  • Early Childhood Development: Toxic Stress and Adverse Childhood Experiences
  • Prevention in Action Series: Teaching the SAPST at a University
  • Minecraft, not Ms. Pac-Man: Transforming Prevention Presentations for Today's Audience
  • Evaluation
  • Social Media and Use of Technology
  • “Talk. They Hear You.” Campaign

Online Courses
All online courses can be accessed at: healtheknowledge.org/courses
 
If you are new to HealtheKnowledge, please log in or set up an account here: healtheknowledge.org/new-user
Check out the Mid America Prevention Technology Transfer Center website for additional resources and training!
Mid-America PTTC
The Mid-America Prevention Technology Transfer Center (Mid-America PTTC) is designed to serve as a prevention catalyst, empowering individuals and fostering partnerships to promote safe, healthy, and drug-free communities across Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Our services are evidence-based, culturally competent, and locally focused. We provide intensive technical assistance to support organizations' and systems' efforts to implement evidence-based prevention strategies. The Mid-America PTTC also forms partnerships with local and regional stakeholders to ensure that the training needs of the region are identified and met.

The Mid-America PTTC goals are to:
  • Accelerate the adoption and implementation of evidence-based and promising substance misuse prevention strategies.
  • Heighten the awareness, knowledge, and skills of the workforce that addresses substance misuse prevention.
  • Foster regional and national alliances among culturally diverse practitioners, researchers, policymakers, funders, and the local communities.

To learn more about our services:  Mid-America PTTC
Applying SAMHSA’s Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF)
Iris E. Smith, Ph.D., M.P.H.
SAMHSA’s Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) is an iterative and cyclic process, first introduced in 2004. The SPF framework is a data driven planning model consisting of 5 steps: Assessment, Capacity Building, Planning, Implementation and Evaluation. Decisions at each step are based on a systematic collection and analysis of information on community characteristics, risk and protective factors related to substance abuse, and the community’s capacity and readiness to engage in prevention activities. The underlying premise is that the effectiveness of prevention strategies should be data-driven and depend in large measure on how well they match the community’s attitudes, needs, and resources. The 5 steps of the SPF are described below.

Assessment
The SPF Framework emphasizes the importance of understanding the scope, severity of community level consequences of substance use, the risk and protective factors at both the individual and community level. Epidemiology has a critical role at this stage to understand community-specific data in the context of state and national trends. Assessment is ongoing. Changes in community conditions, demographics, drug use patterns, and associated consequences should be documented periodically throughout the implementation period. Assessment methods should be respectful of cultural norms and values. At a minimum, survey instruments and data collection methods should be linguistically appropriate for the intended evaluation participants.

Capacity
Understanding the community’s capacity and readiness is also critical to the success of prevention strategies. Over time, these may change in response to changing community conditions or as a result of the prevention strategies being implemented. Documenting shifts in capacity over time will help identify emerging training and technical assistance needs, identify when program modifications may be needed, and contribute to the overall evaluation of prevention strategies.
 
Planning
The SPF Framework advocates systematic and periodic assessment of community level data to ensure that planned strategies will meet the needs of the community. The Framework emphasizes the importance of selecting evidence-based strategies that match community conditions and characteristics. Ensuring that strategies are culturally relevant and respectful of community values and norms is important.

Implementation
Ongoing monitoring of the implementation process ensures that strategies are implemented with fidelity and incorporating systematic monitoring to determine if anticipated performance benchmarks are being met is important through the implementation period.

Evaluation
Last, but not least, the evaluation plan should detail what information will be needed to demonstrate the success of prevention efforts. Ideally, the evaluation plan should be developed during the planning phase or early in implementation. The plan should identify performance benchmarks, data collection methods, instruments and analytic procedures.

Cultural competency and sustainability are cross-cutting concepts that need to be incorporated at each step of the SPF. The SPF emphasizes the importance of building partnerships and collaborations within the community. Cultural “brokers”, i.e. individuals or organizations familiar with specific ethnic or cultural groups within the community can help identify specific cultural adaptations that might need to be made to recruitment, implementation, or evaluation strategies to increase the relevance, accessibility and acceptance of planned prevention activities.

The term sustainability refers to a program’s longevity after initial seed funding has expired. Research on sustainability is limited, but interest in this topic is clearly growing. In a study of 243 evidence-based programs in Pennsylvania, Rhoads et al. (2015) found that organizational and community stakeholder support, better program fit (i.e. lack of reasons for changing the program model) knowledgeable, well trained program implementers and sustainability planning were related to sustainability past the initial funding cycle. [1] In a similar study of evidence based programs in Tennessee, Collins et al. (2017) found increases in data resources, funding, level of expertise available during implementation and level of coalition formalization at the end of the SPF SIG predicted the length of sustainability. [2]

There have been surprisingly few evaluation studies examining the contribution of the SPF Framework to successful implementation and outcomes of prevention strategies. A 2012 study by Eddy et al [3] examined the utility of the SPF to assess changes in community needs and implement a comprehensive strategy of evidence-based programs targeting youth, parents and the community from 2001-2009 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Using the SPF model to monitor changes in key prevention targets, these researchers documented statistically significant declines in past-month alcohol use, ease of obtaining alcohol, decrease in binge drinking and increase in perceived parental disapproval of alcohol use. These authors conclude that the SPF Framework was a significant factor in their ability to strengthen community alliances, introduce evidence-based programs, and measure and sustain significant reductions in underage drinking.
 
Orwin et al. (2014) [4] , in a study of 26 SPF-SIG State grantees, examined how the use of the SPF framework contributed to increased prevention capacity and infrastructure. The study found increases in strategic planning, workforce development, and data systems as a result of the application of the SPF Framework. In addition, they observed increases in vertical and horizontal integration of prevention activities in State level grantees. The researchers conclude that, “ By employing data-based decision making, following a sequential and structured process and focusing on empirically-based environmental practices, it [SPF] can take community based prevention to a level of sophistication and cost effectiveness that will help to advance the field and potentially serve as a model for other community public health initiatives . “

References
  1. Rhoads Cooper B, Bumbarger BK, Moore JE (2015). Sustaining Evidence-Based Prevention Programs: Correlates in a Large-Scale Dissemination Initiative. Prevention Science 16 (1), pg. 145-157.
  2. Johnson K, Collins D, Shamblen S, Kenworthy T, Wandersman A (2017). Long Term Sustainability of Evidence Based Prevention Interventions and Community Coalitions Survival: A Five- and One-Half Year Follow-up Study. Prevention Science 18 (5), pg. 610-621.
  3. Eddy JJ, Gideonsen MD, McClaffin, O’Halloran P, Peardon FA, Radcliffe PL, & Masters LA (2012). Reducing Alcohol Use in Youth Aged 12-17 years Using the Strategic Prevention Framework. Journal of Community Psychology 40(5), pg. 607-620.
  4. Orwin RG, Stein-Seroussi A, Edwards JM, Landy AL, Flewelling RI (2014). Effects of the Strategic Prevention Framework Incentive Grant (SPF SIG) on State Prevention Infrastructure I 26 States. Journal of Primary Prevention 35; pg. 163-180.
Iris E. Smith, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Iris Smith is Associate Professor Emeritus of Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health where she has taught graduate courses in Program Evaluation, Substance Abuse, Social Determinants of Health, and the Mental Health Capstone course. In addition to teaching Iris also served as principal or co-investigator for numerous studies on the prenatal effects of alcohol and other drugs and treatment and interventions with substance abusing women, including a treatment demonstration grant for pregnant and parenting addicted women and their children (1979-1999). From 2004-2011 she was Co-investigator for the Emory Prevention Research Center and from 2007 to 2010 she served as the lead evaluator for the Atlanta Clinical Translational Science Institute.