What is it?
Screening refers to using a tool to identify students at risk for or already experiencing drinking-related difficulties. Brief intervention refers to one session (or a series of short sessions) in which a student (or group of students) receives some form of counsel in regard to an alcohol-related concern. Screening and brief intervention are optimally conducted together (SBI for short). The aim of SBI is to support students in making healthier choices in this area of their lives.
Traditionally, SBI has taken the form of face-to-face conversations between a student(s) and a clinician who may or may not be a substance use expert. Now, however, SBI is administered in a wide range of ways, including via telephone, mail, email or online.
SBI, when conducted in person, typically involves these features:
One widely valued style for SBI is motivational interviewing, a client-centred method of inspiring students to make healthy choices by exploring and resolving any ambivalence they may have about changing their drinking habits. It is based on respecting and facilitating the student’s capacity to identify and grasp issues, consider, decide on and actively pursue solutions. SBI also provides students with self-help resources that help them to support their new, less harmful drinking patterns.
Level of research support: Strong evidence of effectiveness
Why do it?
Impact on students: Studies show that students who receive SBI reduce their harmful use of alcohol.
Impact on campus environment: In short, SBI helps create a healthier, safer campus. It does so not just by increasing alcohol awareness but also encouraging an ongoing self-monitoring of consumption among students. As well, it generates greater appreciation for campus-based health services.
Cost: At the community level, SBI is a demonstrated contributor to reduced health care expense. Similar alleviation of burden is suggested in the campus context. Some orientation or training is required (depending on the format of SBI being used), tools are readily available (or modifiable), and financial requirements of most activities are minimal.
Who is it for?
Who can facilitate it?
How can we implement it?
SBI does not require a health care professional to facilitate it. With some basic support almost any on-campus staff member can do brief interventions. SBI can also be administered via alternative applications--telephone, mail, email or online.
Offer SBI via self-help applications
Evidence suggests there is substantial value in delivering SBI via self-help vehicles including telephone, mail, email or online applications. These can be designed and/or programmed to provide personalized feedback, with messaging that serves the same purpose as motivational interviewing. Besides cutting down on expenses, web-based applications of SBI are particularly useful in reaching large numbers of students on a continuing basis. What’s more, they can be set up to become part of routine campus entrance, registration and/or orientation procedures.
Use professional facilitators
A wide variety of students access campus health and counseling services for a variety of reasons, making the locations strategic places to administer SBI as a routine part of students’ visits with professional health care providers.
While one-on-one conversations between a student and clinician have proven best for personal disclosure of alcohol-related behaviours, SBI can be effectively delivered to a group of students. However, it should be kept in mind that group dynamics can present particular challenges and potential impediments to progress.
The advantage of using campus health and counseling services involves the facilitators themselves. Students are more likely to take seriously an intervention delivered in a healthcare setting.
A particularly cost-effective and appropriate strategy using professional personnel to conduct the SBI involves requiring all students to fill out a substantial alcohol screen (either administered on paper or electronically) before they meet face-to-face with a clinician.
Draw upon student peers and campus personnel
Because SBI does not require the one administering it to be a substance use expert, campuses can equip student peers and institutional personnel—faculty members, student services, academics staff, athletics coaches—with SBI training and tools for use with students they suspect may be in need.
Student peers and campus personnel can be quickly and easily trained to check up on a student’s alcohol use patterns and experiences of harms. They can also be trained to provide the kind of personalized feedback that offers a student a framework for reflection on where they are at regarding their alcohol use, their expectancies and reasons for drinking, and their perceptions of alcohol-related norms and popular myths. They can easily learn to consider risk factors, and recognize both hazardous behaviours and protective behavioural strategies, before helping a student set goals for changing their drinking behaviours.
Article: Minimal Interventions
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