Cardinal Health and Ohio State University's College of Social Work are partnering in two ways. Firstly, Cardinal Health and the LiFE Sports Initiative are teaming up to provide an effective mechanism to increase knowledge and awareness in the broader Columbus community pertaining to the abuse and misuse of prescription medications. The core audiences include: urban youth, youth/high school athletic coaches, and parents. These three targets were selected because research points to the fact that prescription drug use by teens is influenced (or can be influenced) by those closest to them, which include: other youth, coaches, and parents (Ford, 2008; Sung, et al, 2005). Specifically, by targeting youth through the LiFE Sports Camp, the message will be given to underprivileged youth. This is critical because adolescents who report lower total family income are at increased risk for nonmedical prescription drug use (Ford, 2008; Kroutil et al., 2006). Coaches will be targeted to spread this message to their athletes as it has been found that coaches play a crucial role in the perceptions and behaviors of youth (Smith & Smoll, 1997) and can affect youth positively when given the proper training (Coatsworth & Conroy, 2006). Finally, parent education has been proposed based on research that indicates that adolescents with strong bonds to parents/family and schools are less likely to be substance users (Ford, 2008).
Secondly, CAYCI is collaborating with Cardinal Health to provide an evaluation tool for grantees of the Preventing the Abuse and Misuse of Prescription Medication grant program. OSU-CSW will go through a rigorous process of scale development to provide Cardinal Health with a survey tool to measure impacts associated with their investments in 8 funded projects. Cardinal Health will work with each of their funded projects to collect data using the provided instruments (click here to see the adult tool and the youth tool). OSU-CSW will then use the data to complete all data management and analyses processes. In the end, each program will receive a short report summarizing their findings, and data will be reported to Cardinal Health in aggregate.
For more information on how CAYCI plans to provide this education, please contact us directly.
