Clinical Summary
Clinical Summary: Exploring Health Care Provider Knowledge and Perceptions of Family Support for Patients With Substance Use Disorders
Clinicians treating substance use disorder often recognize that recovery extends beyond the individual patient, yet family-based support remains inconsistently used in routine care. This study highlights a practical implementation gap: providers largely endorse family support services, but many lack confidence in integrating them and rarely make referrals.
Design
A quantitative, cross-sectional survey
N
104 survey participants
Population
Health care providers in psychiatry and internal medicine departments at a major urban academic center
Setting
a major urban academic center
Key Findings
- Providers strongly endorsed family support in SUD care, with 95.19% considering family support services to be critical for SUD care, 92.31% believing these services improve patient outcomes, and 91.35% agreeing that family support should be included as an element of SUD treatment plans.
- Support for family involvement did not translate into routine referral or confidence in implementation: 73.08% rarely refer, 63.64% were neutral or disagreed that they felt confident incorporating family support into SUD plans, and 76.92% recognized that introducing these services may bring new challenges to SUD treatment dynamics.
- Psychiatric providers reported markedly more favorable views than internal medicine providers, including greater agreement that family support improves patient outcomes (100% vs 84%, P=.002), improves treatment adherence (98.15% vs 74%, P<.001), reduces relapse (87.04% vs 42%, P<.001), and greater confidence integrating these services into treatment (59.26% vs 12%, P<.001).
- Psychiatric providers also had more exposure to SUD care and family contact than internal medicine providers, encountering SUD patients more frequently (59.26% vs 28%, P<.001) and interacting with family members of SUD patients more often (42.59% vs 8%, P<.001).
- Older respondents were more confident than younger respondents both in the evidence for family support services (81.03% vs 60.87%, P=.023) and in their ability to incorporate these services into a treatment plan (46.55% vs 23.91%, P=.017).
Clinical Bottom Line
Family support is widely viewed by clinicians as an important component of SUD treatment, but referral and implementation lag far behind endorsement. Training and systems support appear especially needed for internal medicine and younger clinicians, who reported the lowest confidence in using these services.
Practice Implications
- Do not assume that positive attitudes toward family involvement will produce referrals; if family support resources exist, make referral pathways explicit because 73.08% of respondents rarely refer despite 95.19% rating these services as critical.
- Assess clinician comfort with family-based SUD care, particularly among younger providers, since only 23.91% of younger respondents felt confident incorporating these services into a treatment plan compared to 46.55% of older respondents.
- Target education and workflow support to internal medicine settings, where belief in benefit and confidence in integration were lower than in psychiatry, including 12% vs 59.26% confidence in integrating these services into treatment.
- Build structured opportunities for family engagement into SUD care, as clinicians frequently saw patients with SUD daily (44.23%) or a few times per week (49.04%), but only 25.96% engaged with families frequently.
