Substance abuse attitudes and policies in US rehabilitation training programs: A comparison of 1985 and 2000

Basford JR, Rohe DE, Barnes CP, DePompolo RW. Substance abuse attitudes and policies in US rehabilitation training programs: a comparison of 1985 and 2000. Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2002;83:517-22. Objective: To assess and compare the attitudes, beliefs, and policies of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) training programs toward substance abuse and tobacco use over the last 15 years. Design: A blinded questionnaire was sent to all US rehabilitation medicine training program directors. Results were compared with a survey conducted in 1985. Setting: US PM&R residency training programs with inpatient rehabilitation training. Participants: Training directors or their designated agents. Intervention: A 35-item questionnaire was mailed between November 1999 and April 2000 to the 81 US training programs identified by the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation as having rehabilitation training programs with inpatient rehabilitation units. Responses were pooled by our Survey Research Center to preserve anonymity. Training programs that did not respond received additional mailings and telephone calls to improve the response rate. Main Outcome Measures: Chi-square analysis to assess changes in responses with time. Results: Forty-six of the 79 (58%) eligible training programs responded (1 program had merged, 1 did not provide inpatient rehabilitation). Programs were located in cities ranging from less than 100,000 (n = 2) to greater than a million inhabitants (n = 18). Eighty percent (37/46) of the respondents were “concerned or very concerned” about their patients' alcohol and drug use, and 69% routinely assessed patients for alcohol and drug use compared with only 25% in 1985 (P