Fidelity of Seeking Safety Implemented in a Drug Court Serving Females Addicted to Prescription Opiates

In today’s troubled economy, service providers increasingly face pressure to implement interventions with proven effectiveness. In order to facilitate their dissemination, adoption, and standardization, many evidence-based behavioral health interventions have been transformed into “manualized” treatments that proscribe a specific sequence of techniques and strategies that are to be followed during therapy sessions. Despite these interventions’ codification, counselors often implement them in a manner that is not fully consistent with the intended delivery format. To this end, “fidelity assessment” is a process evaluation procedure designed to monitor the extent to which an intervention is delivered as intended. Research has consistently demonstrated that interventions implemented with a high degree of fidelity are more effective than those implemented with less fidelity. Seeking Safety is a manualized behavioral health intervention for treatment of co-occurring substance use disorders and trauma. In thus study, three independent evaluators will use the Seeking Safety Adherence Scale to monitor the fidelity of the Seeking Safety intervention delivered in the context of a federally-funded drug court serving females addicted to prescription opiates. Three independent evaluators will rate several treatment sessions delivered by one of the two drug court program therapists. This presentation will describe the project’s rationale, methods, and findings