The Community Academic Partnership on Addiction (CAPA) Clinic, a partnership between the Brown School and Preferred Family Healthcare (PFH), was able to increase treatment completion rates by 11% over a six-month time period.
“This is excellent work and very strong findings,” said Mary McKay, the Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. “This is great news for all the people involved in this important work and especially for individuals seeking substance use disorder treatment with our partner organization, Preferred Family Healthcare.”
CAPA is embedded in a PFH facility that offers medical detoxification along with residential and outpatient behavioral health services. It has a full clinical staff of therapists, counselors, community support and peer specialists along with a medical doctor, two nurse practitioners and about a dozen nurses.
The partnership added social work student interns working toward their master’s and doctoral degrees with an interest in careers in addiction-related services.
“Because successful addiction treatment completion is such an important health outcome, we at the clinic began focusing our attention toward improving the clinic’s treatment completion rates,” said David Patterson Silver Wolf, associate professor at the Brown School and director of CAPA.
This first-of-its-kind addiction-focused community-academic collaboration offers many opportunities for teaching, learning and research, Patterson Silver Wolf said.