New ADAI Publication: Expanding the Contingency Management Workforce to Include Peer Specialists

Citation: Hartzler B, et al. Reason to expand the contingency management workforce: Coaching-to-criterion results for addiction professionals and peer specialists. Subst Use Addict 2025 (in press). [doi: 10.1177/29767342251363007]

Contingency management (CM) is a type of behavior therapy that uses rewards to motivate people in treatment for substance use disorder. These rewards encourage positive treatment behaviors, like attending therapy sessions or taking medications as prescribed. CM has strong research support and is one of the few treatments proven effective for stimulant use disorder in particular.

Even with this strong evidence, though, CM is not widely used. A major challenge is making sure addiction treatment workers have the right training to use CM correctly. Another issue is clarifying which members of the workforce are capable of delivering the intervention.

In this paper, the authors, including three staff from ADAI’s Center for Advancing Addiction Health Services (CAAHS), Bryan Hartzler, Jennifer Verbeck, and Mandi Nugent, describe a study that tested whether peer support specialists could successfully deliver CM and whether they were as effective at that delivery as more traditional addiction professionals.

Key findings:

• A coaching-to-criterion approach, which included group coaching, role-playing, performance feedback, and other activities, helped both addiction professionals and peer specialists learn to deliver CM effectively.
• Peer specialists performed just as well as addition professionals in providing CM.
• The study adds to growing evidence that peer-delivered CM is both possible and effective.

Read the paper here.

Need help getting a copy? Contact Meg Brunner, MLIS (meganw@uw.edu).