By 2024, 1 in 4 members of the United States workforce will be 55 years or older.  In the addiction treatment and recovery field, concerns about the aging workforce are compounded by the overdose epidemic, high rates of staff turnover, and the rapidly changing behavioral healthcare landscape. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop a new generation of addiction treatment and recovery leaders. 

To address this need, the New England ATTC recently announced the launch of a new intensive technical assistance (TA) initiative for aspiring leaders in the addictions field: the Leadership Development Program (LDP).
 

In response to this identified need, Region 8 ATTC and MHTTC offered training/TA activities and developed products related to treating co-occurring disorders. Given the rural and frontier nature of Region 8, the issue of treating co-occurring disorders requires an examination of this topic in the context of farming families and their communities...

To promote the expansion of new learning strategies, SEA-HATTC mapped out an implementation of behavioral health ECHO® (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) model as a guided practice strategy for transforming medical education and increasing workforce capacity to teach best-practice specialty care.Having been endorsed as a highly innovative strategy that produces improvements in the quality and efficiency of integrated care, ECHO is a low-cost yet high-impact intervention linking expert inter-disciplinary teams of practitioners through tele-education.

After 25 years of conducting training workshops, translating research into bite-size pieces for curricula or stand-alone products, and creating opportunities for performance feedback to enhance skill development, the ATTCs are ‘upping their game’ to offer novel training/technical assistance (TA) options that include multiple learning components in new delivery formats focused on changing practices. Leading these efforts in 2017-2018, the Pacific Southwest ATTC and partner institutions recently began implementing new training models for workforce development...

From 2002 to 2018, recognition has increased for evidence-based studies that focus on the importance of patient spirituality in treatment and healing of SUDs due to a mandate by the Joint Commission on Accreditation and Healthcare for the administration of a spiritual assessment by healthcare providers for patients and their families. 

For the past 17 years, the Southeast ATTC has collaborated with communities of faith through the facilitation of conferences, learning academies, listening sessions, webinars and SUD workshops.

Northeast & Caribbean ATTC has been providing various trainings to the Drug Courts of Puerto Rico - a program that seeks the recovery of people with substance use disorders through a continuous and intensive judicial follow up - delivering a total of 15 trainings and impacted 442 providers.