Spotlight
Empowering Health Care Professionals to Provide Evidence-Based Care
Since its release just over a year ago, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Healthcare Professional’s Core Resource on Alcohol (HPCR) has been the focus of ongoing efforts to empower health care professionals in providing evidence-based alcohol-related care.
Central to these efforts has been partnering with clinical educators, trainees, and state health departments to create awareness and extend the reach of the resource among emerging and established clinicians. These partnering activities have involved NIAAA outreach to hundreds of health care professional school deans, program directors, residency directors, and state health department leaders nationwide. Recent efforts during summer 2023 included outreach to the 30,000 members of the American Medical Student Association.
To help health care professionals focus on what’s most important to them and their patients, NIAAA added a new Roadmap for Applying the Core Resource to the HPCR in June of this year. The Roadmap sorts HPCR articles broadly into “how-to content” and “context for care” to show how they could be applied in different aspects of clinical practice. It is important to note that all HPCR articles offer free continuing medical education/continuing education (CME/CE) credit for physicians, physician assistants, nurses, psychologists, and pharmacists.
Moving forward, NIAAA will continue partnerships to highlight the HPCR and the importance of delivering evidence-based alcohol-related care by health care providers and health plan organizations. One of these efforts includes a collaboration with the National Committee for Quality Assurance to raise awareness of how the HPCR can help clinicians surmount the challenges they often face in implementing screening practices and follow-up for alcohol use disorder.
For more information about the HPCR, including how to earn up to 10.75 free CME/CE credits, visit niaaa.nih.gov/health-professionals-communities/core-resource-on-alcohol.
