Cognitive and behavioral change in health care professionals after training in the treatment of injection drug users.

A training program was implemented for 56 health care professionals who work with injection drug users (IDUs) in Spain. The aims were to change health care professionals' concepts of drug treatment for IDUs and increase the knowledge required to implement effective drug treatment programs and train professionals who would in turn train other professionals, thus creating a network. Follow-up was carried out at 8 months. All of the professionals had little prior experience in designing and implementing risk reduction programs. At the end of the training program, all thought that they had increased their knowledge; had gained the skills required to design, implement, and evaluate harm reduction programs for IDUs; and felt qualified to train colleagues from other treatment centers. After 1 year, they had trained 676 health care professionals. The program is appropriate with regard to the aims sought and the target population for which it was designed. The effectiveness of a network-building strategy was also validated.