Substance Abuse Research Education and Training (SARET)

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Project Summary The New York University Grossman School of Medicine (NYU SoM) and its collaborating partners propose to evolve and disseminate the impact of a program that fosters substance use disorder (SUD) research training for trainees in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, social work and public health. The purpose of this program, currently in its fifteenth year, is to stimulate participants’ interest in pursuing careers in SUD research. Using an interactive web-based educational design, we have developed a flexible and content-rich Substance Abuse Research Education and Training (SARET) program to educate medical, nursing, dental, social work and public health students about addiction and the fundamentals of clinical research. A subset of learners, often motivated by participation in this curriculum, participate in a summer-long program centered on an intensive SUD-related research experience with a seasoned mentor, aimed at stimulating enduring interest in this field. The SARET program is an interprofessional collaboration between the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, NYU College of Dentistry, NYU Silver School of Social Work and NYU School of Global Public Health. Our collaboration has built successfully on our extensive experience in developing and evaluating innovative approaches to health professional education and in substance use- related research and training. Working closely with our research, education and clinical partners (including a NIDA CTN node and Bellevue Hospital Center), we have developed, implemented and evaluated this innovative and engaging educational platform, integrating it into our participating schools’ curricula (with over 22,000 module completions at NYU schools to date) and creating rich and intensive individual mentored research experiences for over 110 participants. Our evaluation data suggest substantive positive impact on attitudes towards substance abuse research, and significant influence on subsequent research engagement among those who participated in mentored summer research placements. By continually refreshing the content of the SARET curriculum, and making it exportable to other health professional schools and training programs, we have facilitated its dissemination to learners around the country, and a new component of SARET in which we support visiting faculty mentors from other schools in developing programs of mentored SUD research at their home institutions is further advancing the program’s spread. We are now poised to enter the fourth “phase” of the SARET initiative – in which we will deepen its focus on themes of health equity and racial justice, and further increase its impact by seeding the initiation of similar programs at other health professional training programs nationally. Overall, our goal is to increase the number of physicians, nurses, dentists, social workers and public health practitioners who, stimulated by their participation in this initiative, will follow career paths that advance clinically-oriented research addressing substance use disorders.