Knowledge, attitudes and practice of family health team professionals in the attention to psychoactive substances users

The abuse of alcohol and other drugs is a public health problem, which family health teams must be trained and qualified for the care of this population. Thus, the present study had the general objective of: Assessing the knowledge, attitudes and practices of the professionals who are part of the Family Health Teams in the health care of users with problems related to the use of psychoactive substances; and had as specific objectives: To describe the knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding the use of psychoactive substances by health professionals who are part of the Family Health Teams; Conduct in-service training on psychoactive substances based on Brief Intervention for professionals in the Family Health Team; To analyse the impact of in-service training on the knowledge of the professionals of the Family Health Teams in the perspective of Brief Intervention. Methodology: This is a Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices sectional survey followed by a quasi-experimental study. For the sectional study, 318 professionals who worked in Family Health Teams in a planning area in the city of Rio de Janeiro were interviewed. The data collection instrument was a self- administered questionnaire with questions related to the socio-demographic profile, knowledge, attitudes and practices related to the health care of psychoactive substances users. For the quasi-experimental design, in-service training was carried out with 17 professionals from the Family Health Teams, using a self-administered questionnaire before and after the intervention. All data was analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences program (IBM SPSS, v.23.0). Results: It was evident that most of the interviewees were female, adults (median = 38), Christians, community health workers and who worked on the Family Health Strategy for 1 to 5 years. There was a predominance of inappropriate knowledge, attitudes and practices related to the health care of psychoactive substances users, there was a statistically significant difference between inappropriate attitudes and inappropriate practices. After in-service training, there was an improvement in adequate knowledge. Conclusion: It was observed that there is still a weakness in the knowledge, attitudes and practices offered by professionals of the Family Health Strategy for people with use/abuse psychoactive substances. Thus, a greater offer of in-service training courses on alcohol and other drugs is recommended so that it can influence appropriate attitudes and practices.