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Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) HEAL Initiative: Workforce Interventions to Improve Addiction Care Quality and Patient Outcomes

National Institutes of Health

Through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping to End Addiction Long-Term (HEAL) initiative seeks studies that identify, develop, and/or evaluate strategies to address challenges with recruiting, training, and retaining a robust and highly qualified behavioral health workforce. Strategies explored through this initiative should focus on increasing recruitment and retention, improving provider training, reducing stigma among providers, increasing access to care and number of patients served, improving quality of care, and/or improving patient outcomes.

For the purposes of this funding opportunity announcement (FOA), the behavioral health workforce is defined as practitioners who deliver substance use and mental health treatment or prevention services or who play critical roles in connecting people who use drugs to services that can reduce their risk of overdose and death. This could include, but is not limited to: addiction counselors; mental health counselors; addiction medicine specialists; buprenorphine prescribers, including primary care physicians and nurse practitioners; social workers; peer recovery workers; harm reduction interventionists; prevention interventionist; etc.

Studies proposed for this FOA may target individual-, organizational-, system- and macro-level dynamics, which include but are not limited to:

Individual-level dynamics: emotional stressors such as burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious and secondary trauma, and feeling unqualified to provide effective treatment
Organizational-level dynamics: staffing shortages, leadership and clinical supervision, task-shifting, integration of peer interventionists
System-level dynamics: low wages, reimbursement rates that are not on par with other medical services, billing constraints, limited resources to provide trainings for practitioners, shifts to telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic, X waiver requirements, licensure requirements, and scope of practice laws
Macro-level dynamics that cut across all levels of possible intervention: stigma toward individuals with substance use disorder, impacts of COVID-19 on service providers, role of technology in service delivery, workforce diversity and relationship to disparities in care, geographic disparities in care access, interorganizational service linkages and relationships among practitioners

This notice applies to due dates on or after October 5, 2022 and subsequent receipt dates through September 8, 2025.

NOT-DA-23-008