Hello everyone and welcome back. In our past section we have talked a little bit about some types of prevention programs. In this section we are going to talk a little bit about how to build a prevention program. So let's begin by going to slide two.

First of all as we can see here you do not have to have a lot of money to develop a good prevention program. You do not need to have a lot of governmental oversight or a variety of other things as well. You do have to have is some kind of ongoing evaluation in relation to developing a prevention program.

There is a variety of steps that one needs to take and I have listed these all here for you to give you an idea. Let's talk a little bit about each of these in a little detail.

The first thing, as you can see in slide four is you have to examine community readiness. That is, does the community have buy-in at all? If the community does not have any buy-in in relation to the program then your program is going to fail. You also need to examine the community’s readiness to change. This aspect ranges on a continuum. The range on one end basically has the community having no knowledge or tolerating the problem in their area. On the other end you might have a huge prevention staff and a huge prevention program that is being run by a bunch of professionals. The key to whatever you are doing is you have to identify strategies to assist the community and to help them if they are going to want to change.

The next step as we see in slide five is to assess risk. What that means is that you have to find out what is really going on out there in relation to risk factors if you want to make some kind of intervention. So you need to collect some data. In the state of Idaho you have the website that we talked about previously in this class and that is www.class.uidaho.edu/sasi. This is again a one stop shopping place where you can get all sorts of information related to substance treatment and substance abuse prevention. Basically what it is is a huge archival data set of data from a wide variety of different areas. Now if one does not want to look at archival data, one may conduct a survey however, surveys are rather expensive, they take time, and if you do not do them well you are going to get bad data. You are also going to need to assess the data, analyze the data or get someone else to it. Again that will cost money and so you need to be careful about that.

The key is that you have to identify and assess the risk that is going on out there in relation to prevention and to whether there are risks involved at all for substance abuse. Now once you have all this data you have to prioritize it. And as you can see in slide six you have to identify the greatest risks for substance abuse and protective factors out there in relation to the substance abuse as well. You may also identify a cluster of risk factors and then you have to determine which one you are going to focus on first. You might focus on all of them or you might focus on one specific aspect and then move to the next one when that one is done.

The next step as we see in slide seven is to examine the community resources that you have. Many communities have lots of resources. Many communities also have very few formal resources but they have lots of informal resources, that is Joe down at the local garage often times help youth stay out of trouble. However, many communities have no resources at all and this is especially true when you are out at rural communities. The key that you need to do is to identify gaps and avoid duplication of resources and services that are out there. Ultimately, what one should do is build collaboration and cooperation among a wide variety of providers and people who are out there working in the prevention fields.

From there as we can see in slide eight, you then target your efforts. You can use a universal strategy where you are basically providing information to the entire population. Or you can focus on selective strategies where you target on some particular subset. Or you can even look at indicated variables, such as, focusing on individuals who are showing early danger signs of substance abuse. That is, individuals who may be dropping out of school, or having poor grades, or they may be consuming gateway drugs such as alcohol, cigarettes, etc. Now you have all this information.

The next thing you are going to do is identify which community you are going to focus on? Are you going to focus on the whole community or a particular subset? And then as we see in slide nine, you are going to need to focus on what strategies you are going to use. Are you going to use media to help you get out your message? Are you going to use peer-to-peer or whatever? Of course, do you have the resources to complete the particular project?

The next step one needs to do and is shown in slide ten, is to identify best practices. Best practices are basically practices that have already been done and implemented, and they work. They have basically also been validated empirically. What they try to do is increase protective factors and reduce risks. They target all sorts of aspects related to substance abuse. You can get a manual that describes a wide variety of these from CSAT or you can also get them from the Western Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies or what we call WESTCAP. WESTCAP has produced a manual called The Best and Promising Practices for Substance Abuse Prevention. It is in its third edition and you can get that from the federal government at www.samsha.gov.

The next major step as we see in slide eleven is to evaluate the program that you are doing and this is the most important component to your prevention project. It is also the least focused on by the users that are out there. Basically what that means is that you are going to need good experimental or quasi-experimental designs to really determine whether your program is working or not working. If it is not working then it is really a waste of time and money. If it is working and working very well it is something that might be replicated in other areas.

So in conclusion when you are developing a particular prevention program there is lots of stuff to do and as we can see in slide twelve, you need to know lots of stuff and you need to do lots of stuff. The key is to let others help you. Prevention is a community effort and one person doing a prevention project will usually fail whereas if you have the whole community buying into the prevention program you will usually have much better success.

Well, that concludes this section; we hope you are having yourself a great day and we look forward to talking with you soon.

Back