Promoting evidenced-based practices in substance use prevention for community-based centers in North-West Nigeria

Background: Evidenced based practices are still new in Nigeria, the challenges of inadequate personnel and treatment facilities for substance use problems, stigmatization and criminalization of people who use drugs are part of the reasons for unprofessional practices in the country. The population of professionals in this study comes from various fields of people who work with substance users as volunteers to bridge the gap of inadequate substance use personnel in the community.

Methods: A pre-test was conducted at the beginning of the training and the result was compared with the outcome of the post-test which was conducted after the training of the 103 professionals who were categorized as Specialists, Occasional, Volunteers and Societal personnel. The outcome of the training showed that participants test scores before and after the training with a Median score of 43% for Pre-test and a Median score of 81% at Post-test period. A Wilcoxon signed rank test indicated that this difference is statistically significant where T= 5356.00, z=-8.812 p<0.001.

Results: We found out that the participants’ scores were worse before the training 43% as compared to the post-test results of 81%, also the participants have a better level of understanding of evidenced based practices and how to apply professional codes of ethics when carrying out their services to the patients within the community.

Conclusion: This study illustrated that the field of addiction is multidisciplinary in nature and different professionals can do better with continuous trainings.