December 20, 2023, Durham, NC – Prevention professionals have vital responsibilities to plan and implement interventions to combat the risks of impaired driving and promote public health and safety. Many guides, toolkits, and resources exist to help prevention professionals plan and implement effective strategies to prevent drunk driving; however, prevention professionals are still in need of resources to guide their prevention efforts related to drug-impaired driving. A recent study with prevention professionals from across the U.S. working in areas of substance use prevention and highway safety found that prevention professionals don’t feel confident about implementing interventions to prevent drugged driving in their community, and most reported needing additional resources to help locate effective prevention and intervention strategies. With the pervasiveness of opioid use and the increasing legalization of cannabis across the U.S., the country is facing greater risks for traffic accidents and fatalities related to drug-impaired driving, and communities’ needs for effective interventions has become more urgent.
Strategic Skills for the Prevention of Drugged Driving was developed by iRT to address these important needs and provide prevention professionals with strategies for designing and carrying out drugged driving interventions in their community in a data-driven way. The interactive, web-based training is designed to be used by various groups of people who are committed to preventing this problem, including community anti-drug coalition members, school personnel, highway safety officers, law enforcement officers, and others. In this course, trainees learn to apply SAMHSA’s Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) to community-based intervention to prevent drugged driving. The SPF is a research-based planning process focused on assessing a community’s needs around a problem, building organizational capacity to address identified needs, planning community-level interventions or other approaches to address the problem, implementing these actions, and evaluating the extent to which the approach was successful. In addition, the course allows prevention professionals to identify and create a logic model to address the root causes of the problem of drugged driving in their community. Then, trainees develop a set of custom strategies for preventing drugged driving given the challenges, issues, and context of their community.
Strategic Skills for the Prevention of Drugged Driving can be completed in approximately 2.5 hours and consists of three sections:
- How do you assess the problem of drugged driving in your community?
- How do you build capacity to address drugged driving?
- How do you plan your drugged driving prevention approach?
Through a series of engaging, in-depth, interactive activities, prevention professionals learn ways to build their organization’s capacity to plan and implement effective interventions to prevent drug-impaired driving in their community.
The Strategic Skills for the Prevention of Drugged Driving course is part of the Drugged Driving Resources website, a one-stop-shop for trainings and resources for a wide range of audiences to prevent drug-impaired driving. The website, druggeddrivingresources.com, includes the Drugged Driving Research Library, a searchable database of data sources and measures relevant to research and evaluation in the field, and the Drugged Driving Intervention Library, a searchable database of interventions related to drugged driving. In addition to Strategic Skills for the Prevention of Drugged Driving, the website includes Drugged Driving Essentials, an online, self-paced course designed to teach general audiences about the problem of drug-impaired driving as a legal, safety, and public health issue.
Want to start developing strategies to prevent drugged driving in your community? Visit our website to start using the Strategic Skills for the Prevention of Drugged Driving course.