TPC-Journal-V5-Issue4

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 4 463 The intent of this training session is to reinforce counseling students’ sense of competence prior to engaging in interdisciplinary training sessions. This session helps students frame the online training information into counseling-specific terms, steps and experiences while providing them the opportunity to ask questions and clarify their understandings. Importantly, this session requires students to practice the SBIRT skills and to receive feedback and instruction on their use of the skills from familiar faculty in the comfortable environment of counseling peers. Ultimately, this preparation is designed to fortify the confidence that the counseling students bring into the larger, unfamiliar, interdisciplinary practice setting. Next, all participants in the SBIRT training, regardless of specific discipline, are expected to attend two clinical interdisciplinary training sessions. The first of these focuses on screening and motivational interviewing; the second is on referrals. These sessions begin with an introduction to the concepts that will be covered in that training followed by a panel discussion about the particular application of skills in the various disciplines and the modeling of skills (a role play by two of the program directors). The participants are then required to practice the skills with “live” practice clients (i.e., professional actors from the local community that were already employed by the medical school for medical student training) playing patients/clients with substance use or misuse issues. In this part of the training, participants are randomly assigned to small practice groups, providing an interdisciplinary practice milieu, with a faculty instructor. Each interdisciplinary practice group meets with four professional clients over the course of 2 hours. The participants in each group take turns using screening, motivational interviewing and referral skills. In each group, participants receive feedback and instruction from the faculty instructor who has observed their practice. At the end of the session, the training directors engage participants in a large group discussion about their experiences and observations of being part of an interdisciplinary training group. The intent of this approach is to provide participants with the opportunity to practice with students who have different professional orientations and to receive supervision from faculty who may also have diverse experiences and perspectives; thus, the interdisciplinary focus of this project. The final component of the training is follow-up. For counseling students, this begins with a follow-up discussion about the training experience with the counseling faculty at the end of the first year of training (after the second interdisciplinary training session). In this meeting, students are asked to reflect on their experiences in SBIRT training and also to discuss their ideas regarding the implementation of this training into their upcoming internship experiences. The purpose of this discipline-specific follow-up is to assess and solidify the integration of the interdisciplinary experiences into their development as professional counselors. A comprehensive formal evaluation protocol also is in place for the interdisciplinary training program. Students from each of the participating disciplines complete pre- and post-training evaluation forms. During the first year of the project, formal follow-up evaluations were completed in four stages: (1) immediately after students completed the counseling program’s pre-module orientation session; (2) immediately after students completed each of the two interdisciplinary clinical training sessions; (3) six weeks after students completed the final interdisciplinary training session, and (4) six months following completion of the final interdisciplinary clinical training session. These evaluations solicit student self-perceptions of their own competence during the various training experiences and also ask for general feedback about the training process. The six-month follow-up evaluation process is meant to coincide with the students’ internship and residency experiences. The core objective of the final evaluation will be to assess the impact of interdisciplinary training on the students’ current interdisciplinary teamwork experiences.