Global Dissemination of Evidence-based Family Interventions to Improve Health Policy

Introduction: Epigenetic research (Champagne, 2010) suggests reducing family stressors can reduce negative health outcomes. Competent parenting is a powerful protective factor for health and drug prevention (Miller & Hendrie, 2008). The purpose of this research was to locate and disseminate evidence-based family skills interventions for the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Methods: This research included 1) a literature review and publishing the UNODC (2009) Guide to Implementing Family Skills Training Programmes for Drug Abuse Prevention including steps to culturally adapting evidence-based family interventions, 2) locating 500 potential programs from the published and unpublished literature, 3) reviewing the existing research articles to determine the programs' levels of evidence of effectiveness, 4) updating 35 prior USA program descriptions and creating new program descriptions for the new 65 programs located worldwide.5) sending the program descriptions to program developers for their revisions, and 6) submitting to UNODC for publishing on their website for dissemination worldwide.

Results: Over 500 programs were identified and 65 met criteria replication. A number of culturally adapted versions of US developed EBPs have been developed in other languages for other countries. The UNODC is disseminating the three top programs (SFP 10-14 Years, SFP 12-16 Years, and FAST) to developing countries and evaluating their outcomes.

Conclusions: Regular international searches should be conducted because the quantity and quality of research on family interventions is advancing rapidly in many countries. Culturally-adapted family EBPs can be successfully replicated in developing countries.