At Foothold, we’re always looking for ways to facilitate best practices among our entire community of social service providers. One way is by offering an extensive library of canned forms and tools that we’re constantly updating. In our efforts to expand our shared library of substance abuse and mental health assessments, we discovered a rather helpful resource. The Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI), a research facility at the University of Washington, has put together a compendium of alcohol and other substance abuse assessments from all relevant disciplines, including social work, medicine, nursing, criminal justice, psychology and sociology.
We find ADAI’s Substance Use Screening & Assessment Instruments Database to be helpful when searching for tools that are widely used and have proven reliability and validity. This resource is intended to help clinicians and researchers screen and assess substance use and abuse disorders. Many of the assessments in the ADAI Library are in the public domain, for example, the “Addiction Severity Index,” and may be downloaded for free directly from this site. Instruments that are copyrighted are not available for download; however, ADAI provides links to contact and availability information, if known. As always, we encourage our clients to use the AWARDS FormBuilder to create any assessment or screening tool that isn’t readily available, and to take advantage of our library. We hope this resource will also be valuable to you in determining which assessments best fit your clients’ needs and help you in carrying out your service provision. To access the ADAI Library, click here. |