[Substance abuse prevention in the workplace: theoretical knowledge and expertise after interventions]

Although several companies are requesting interventions for substance abuse prevention at the workplace and a wide variety of interventions is successfully introduced into practice, empirical studies investigating the efficacy of such interventions are rare. In the present study 100 executive managers of a German chemical company, who had participated in an intervention to prevent substance consumption at the workplace one year before, were applied a questionnaire to assess effects of the intervention. Data from 22 managers, who had so far not received such an intervention, were collected to serve as a control condition. The intervention itself was designed as a theory oriented half a day course and was conducted in groups of 10 to 12 executive managers of the company. By comparing participants and non-participants, we found significant differences with respect to the knowledge how to deal with substance-related problems of staff members. For example, participants reported more frequently to know the company agreement about addiction. Further, participants reported less frequently to wait until such problems were solved anyway. However, we found no evidence for transfer of theoretical knowledge into practice. For example, we detected no significant group differences with respect to the number of appraisal interviews conducted because of substance-related problems. Taken together, the results of our study indicate, that the implementation of a company agreement about addiction and its introduction into practice based on theoretical courses is not sufficient to produce considerable effects. As an alternative, based on previous experiences we propose a series of workshops with role-plays and feedback to establish expertise in interviewing techniques with substance-related problems.