Helping Alcoholics Link to Substance Abuse Treatment Programs After Being in the Hospital for Detoxification

For those with an alcohol use disorder, the decision to seek detoxification treatment often represents a desire or willingness to change drinking behavior. This gives clinicians with the opportunity to intervene and improve the lives of these individuals. Even patients admitted involuntarily or who have been coerced may be amenable to change. Therefore, inpatient alcohol detoxification treatment offers an opportunity to prepare these patients for and link them with aftercare treatment.

Unfortunately, clinicians have little to guide them on how the current standard of care for alcohol detoxification might be improved. Improvement in clinical practice is ideally driven by clinical research, but there is little recent published information to guide the development of evidence-based pharmacological or psychological practices or interventions in detoxification settings. As a result, alcohol detoxification treatment has changed little over the past 25 years.

Taken as a whole, the literature suggests that the outcomes of inpatient detoxification are less than optimal. A limited number of published studies suggest that a majority of these patients are not linked to any aftercare following inpatient detoxification treatment and return to drinking within a few weeks of hospital discharge. However, there is some evidence to suggest that interventions, performed while the patient is hospitalized, could encourage patients to initiate involvement in aftercare (i.e., professional treatment and/or mutual self-help following hospitalization) and to decrease drinking or initiate abstinence. Motivational Enhancement Therapy and Twelve-Step Facilitation are two interventions that show promise.

The study proposed in this study addresses this issue by testing two brief interventions, Motivation Enhancement Therapy (MET) and Peer-Twelve Step Facilitation (P-TSF, also known as "12th Step Calls"), which have shown potential to enhance initiation of a period of abstinence and engagement in treatment and/or self-help programs among alcohol detoxification patients.