Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment in a rural Ryan White Part C HIV clinic

ABSTRACT

About 24% of people living with HIV nationally are identified as needing treatment for alcohol or illicit drug use. Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) has evolved as a strategy to assess and intervene with substance abuse behaviors in various clinical settings. However, less is known about the processes and outcomes of using the SBIRT intervention in outpatient HIV clinics. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of de-identified existing SBIRT results data from an outpatient HIV clinic located in western Colorado. From 2008 to 2013, a total of 1616 SBIRT evaluations were done, which included duplicate patients because some individual patients were screened more than once in a given year. Over this time period, 37–49% of encounters per year were notable for tobacco use, 8–21% for alcohol use, 6–16% for marijuana use, 3–9% for amphetamine use, and 0–2% for illicit opioid use. Unique, unduplicated patient data from 2013 revealed 40% of patients used tobacco, 16% used alcohol, and 11% used methamphetamine. Analyses highlighted that the majority of our patient population (58% in 2013) used and/or abused tobacco, alcohol, and/or illicit substances. An alarming finding was the increase in methamphetamine use over time with more than 50-fold prevalence of use in our population compared to national rates.

KEYWORDS:

• HIV
• AIDS
• SBIRT
• substance abuse
• outpatient HIV care

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alicia Gutierrez for eight years of exemplary work as an SBIRT educator and Bob Bongiovanni from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for his strong advocacy and support for the integration of SBIRT services into HIV primary care.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.