Nursing’s Shiela Strauss Explores Policies in Drug Treatment Programs

Affecting four to five million Americans, Hepatitis C is four times more prevalent than HIV in the U.S., and sometimes causes chronic liver disease. Shiela Strauss, director of the Muriel and Virginia Pless Center for Nursing Research at NYU’s College of Nursing, has spent a decade studying the disease, which, unlike Hepatitis A and B, has no preventive vaccine.
    Medications available for people with chronic Hepatitis C have extremely arduous side effects, and until new treatments are available, people with the disease need help to reduce or refrain from alcohol consumption to keep their disease from progressing further. In September 2008, Strauss was awarded a nearly $100,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to pursue a one-year study on policies related to alcohol use in state-regulated opioid treatment programs. This work follows from her past National Institutes of Health–funded studies on the ways in which drug-treatment programs educate their patients about Hepatitis C and help them to live healthy lives.  
    Many former heroin users who receive help at opioid-treatment programs (programs using medications such as methadone to treat addiction) have Hepatitis C.  Research has shown that there is excessive use of alcohol by patients in these programs.  With her RWJF grant, Strauss has begun to examine whether policies and services are geared toward helping patients eliminate or cut down on alcohol use. Assisting on the project are nursing doctoral student Carina Katigbak and research assistant Gavin Harris.
    The first phase of the study targets State Opioid Treatment Authorities—the people throughout the United States who are charged with regulating treatment programs in their states. Strauss’s team is interviewing them about their states’ policies regarding education about alcohol use and about screening, testing, and treating patients for alcohol use. In the second phase, Strauss will look at 200 treatment programs to determine whether there is variation within standard state guidelines, whether states have developed innovative ways to implement these policies, and whether programs have added their own policies to the state requirements.