Office of Public Relations — Newsroom
News Release
For Immediate Release
Contact: Tonya Ewers, (303) 724-1520, Tonya.Ewers@uchsc.edu
Project Safe Director Receives $2.6 Million Grant to Reduce Injection Drug Use
DENVER (Oct. 2, 2007) – The University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center (UCDHSC) has received notification from the National Institutes of Health of a new grant award totaling $2.6 million dollars over the next five years. The grant, titled “Interventions to Reduce Injection Drug Use”, targets street-recruited drug injectors and is designed to facilitate their substance abuse treatment entry and retention.
The Principal Investigator, Dr. Robert E. Booth, is professor of Psychiatry at the UCDHSC School of Medicine and Director of Project Safe, a program of the Division of Substance Dependence at the school.
Since 1995, Project Safe has tested various intervention models with the purpose of getting drug injectors to enter treatment. Over the course of the next five years the project will assess the effectiveness of an innovative intervention strategy intended to create a therapeutic alliance between addiction counselors from the Addiction Research and Treatment Services program (ARTS) – a clinical program of the Department of Psychiatry at UCDHSC’s School of Medicine – and out-of-treatment injectors through the use of Project Safe case managers.
The new strategy combines two successful treatment entry intervention approaches into a single model. The approaches are strength-based case management based upon Booth’s previous project in 2005 and 2006 that resulted in a 44 percent treatment entry rate, and the principals of psychotherapy role induction. Role induction has been shown to result in treatment entry rates of 64 to 72 percent, although not with a street-recruited population. Of interest is how successful this combined model will be with clients recruited from the streets of Denver.
"Dr. Booth has been at the forefront of research in engaging the most recalcitrant individuals into treatment,” said Janet Wood, MBA, M.Ed., director of Behavioral Health Services at the Colorado Department of Human Services. “His methods and research have passed the highest standards of review and he has advanced our collective knowledge of reducing high-risk behaviors.”
The goals of the grant are to increase treatment entry and retention rates, thereby reduce drug injection and HIV risk behaviors. The project expects to begin recruitment next month.
“This is an exciting time for our project and the community,” said Booth. “To date, we have been successful in getting nearly 700 drug injectors to enter treatment. These are individuals who, at their time of their initial contact on the street, were not contemplating entering drug treatment or quitting their drug use. With this grant, we expect to be even more successful in that regard.”
For more information on Project Safe, visit www.projectsafestudies.org. For more information about ARTS, visit www.uchsc.edu/arts.
The School of Medicine faculty work to advance science and improve care as the physicians, educators and scientists at University of Colorado Hospital, The Children’s Hospital, Denver Health, National Jewish Medical and Research Center and the Veterans Administration Medical Center. The School is part of the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, one of three universities in the University of Colorado system. For more information, visit the Web site at www.uchsc.edu or the UCDHSC Newsroom at http://www.uchsc.edu/news.
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