School of Nursing’s Max Veltman, associate professor, and Janet Willhaus, assistant professor and Healthcare Simulation Certificate facilitator, are celebrating the publication of the evidence-based project report they co-authored, “Implementation of Motivational Interviewing Training in an Undergraduate Nursing Curriculum: Identifying Adolescents at Risk for Substance Use,” to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Additional authors included Denise Seigart, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania’s dean of the College of Health Sciences and a professor of nursing, and Colene Letterle, school nurse for West Ada School District in Meridian.
The project delved into the use of motivational interviewing by health professionals. Motivational interviewing is an evidence-based practice in the treatment of individuals with substance use problems. It is designed to enhance personal motivation for, and commitment to, a specific goal by exploring individual’s reasons for resistance to change within an atmosphere of caring and compassion. The project focused on the inadequate training of many health care practitioners who, as a result, don’t often use the approach when faced with clients who are in need of assessment and coaching.
To further understand the effects of adequate motivational interviewing training, this project added the Adolescent Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) model to the undergraduate nursing curriculum at Boise State. To test the effects of adding the curriculum, the project conducted pre- and post-tests on 51 undergraduate nursing students with the Substance Use Attitudinal Survey (SAAS) which evaluates student attitudes towards substance users before and after curriculum was added.
As a result, they found that students were satisfied with the implementation of curriculum. However, there was no significant change in SAAS scores, which indicated that continuing evaluation of the curriculum change is still necessary.
Read the full article: Implementation of Motivational Interviewing Training in an Undergraduate Nursing Curriculum: Identifying Adolescents at Risk for Substance Use.