Abstract:

The drug abuse has become one of the major problems of the nation, and as a response to increased demand for programs and experts to meet treatment and preventive needs. As part of these efforts the National Institute of Mental Health has been funding projects that focus on training a wide range of professionals and paraprofessionals. Thus, the agencies were faced to provide individuals working in the field of intensive, short-term training centres handling the clinical and counselling problems of these agencies. With the increasing number of training centres, evaluation of the program effectiveness arose. The present study was performed in the framework of this evaluation process with the final objective to provide an evaluation and validation model for measuring the training effectiveness on professionals and paraprofessionals working in the drug abuse field.