Intermediate
Workshop Session
Brian Hurley, MD, M.B.A., DFASAM
Director of Addiction Medicine
Los Angeles County Department of Health Services
Carla Marienfeld, MD
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
UCSD
University of California San Diego
For those who attended the ASAM motivational interviewing course or those with an existing foundation in motivational interviewing, this session will build upon participants’ existing familiarity with the core concepts and skills of MI through advanced practice of several key areas. We will practice advanced focusing skills, such as agenda mapping, core skills for evocation including ways to elicit from patients and selectively reinforce change talk during common challenging clinical situations. For planning, we will practice ways to know how and when to transition to planning, and how to best accomplish this process consistent with the spirit of MI. The focus of this workshop will be non-didactic, interactive small group practice designed to strengthen participants’ ability to apply the spirit of motivational interviewing in their clinical practices. The spirit of motivational interviewing – compassion, acceptance, evocation, and partnership – serves as a fundamental framework for communicating with patients and can be essential to avoid fatigue, burn out, and unprofessionalism when working with patients who experience suffering and are ambivalent about change. This workshop will support enhanced clinician competence using motivational interviewing and improved clinical performance working with patients trying to change behaviors.
This session addresses addiction medicine patient care competencies by evoking participant’s own behaviors to collect a history, explain an addiction diagnosis consistently with the spirit of MI, and to offer addiction treatment to patients based on a mutually agreed upon plan based in the spirit of MI. Opportunities for participants to enhance these skills within the spirit of motivational interviewing will be provided. The core competency most relevant to this session is interpersonal skills and communication, given that participants will strengthen participant’s ability to communicate with patients based on medical and public health understanding of drug use and addiction, in a manner that is respectful and non-judgmental, their use of motivational strategies to support change, their understanding of their role as a member of a care team and communicate effectively and respectfully with co-care providers, their identification and addressing of the potential barriers to effective communication, and their navigation of cultural barriers.
At the conclusion of this workshop, clinicians will have enhanced competence using motivational interviewing and will be able to improve their performance working with patients trying to change problematic behaviors.