Community-Based Substance Use Prevention
The implementation of community-based prevention efforts helps to reduce substance use initiation by addressing community-level determinants that increase risk. Effective prevention programs integrate the voices of community leaders with lived experiences; provide comprehensive, evidence-based programs in a variety of settings; and encompass the characteristics of the community.
Our researchers understand the important role that community-based prevention efforts play in addressing the ongoing substance use crisis. Through the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) Helping to End Addiction Long-term® Initiative (HEAL), RTI is hosting the NIH HEAL Prevention Coordinating Center, which supports individual projects focused on preventing opioid misuse among older adolescents and young adults. RTI also serves as the cross-site evaluator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s Strategic Prevention Framework for Prescription Drugs (SPF Rx) program, studying the effectiveness of SPF Rx grantee programs in reducing and preventing prescription drug misuse.
To better measure the social factors that impact substance misuse and overdose outcomes, RTI researcher Lisa Lines, PhD, developed the RTI Rarity™ project. This innovative tool creates local social inequity scores based on community-level social determinants of health, which states and local communities can use to prioritize prevention programming based on risk level.