Summary: | The National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment
Services (N-SSATS) (formerly titled Uniform Facility Data Set (UFDS))
is designed to collect information from all facilities in the United
States, both public and private, that provides substance abuse
treatment. N-SSATS is one of three components of SAMHSA's Drug and
Alcohol Services Information System (DASIS) and is designed to provide
the mechanism for quantifying the dynamic character and composition of
the United States substance abuse treatment delivery system. In 1995,
SAMHSA created DASIS to facilitate the integration of its existing
treatment service's datasets and to reduce redundancy in data
collection and reporting. The other two DASIS components are the
Inventory of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (I-SATS) and the
Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS). The I-SATS is a comprehensive
listing of all known substance abuse treatment facilities in the
United States. The TEDS is a client-level database of individuals
admitted to publicly funded substance abuse treatment facilities and
is available from the SAMHDA Web site. Together, these three DASIS
components provide national- and state-level data on persons receiving
alcohol and substance abuse treatment as well as data on the
facilities providing the treatment. Data collected include topics
covering services offered, primary focus (substance abuse, mental
health, both, general health, other), hotline operation,
methadone/LAAM dispensing, languages in which treatment is provided,
type of treatment provided, number of clients (total and under age
18), number of beds, types of payment accepted, sliding fee scale, and
facility accreditation. The data elements and format that
make up the core of the N-SSATS were first used in 1976 as part of
survey efforts designed to measure the scope and use of drug abuse
treatment services in the United States. This core was used throughout
the 1970s and 1980s in several different surveys. In 1987 the first
administration of the National Drug and Alcoholism Treatment Unit
Survey (NDATUS) took place, and then occurred annually from 1989 to
1993. After the creation of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration (SAMHSA) in 1992, NDATUS was redesigned as the
Uniform Facility Data Set (UFDS), which was conducted from 1995 to
1998. In 1999, an abbreviated survey was conducted and the survey was
redesigned. The 1999 study is not available to the public currently
from SAMHDA. In 2000, the full survey was conducted and renamed the
National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS). N-SSATS is a point-prevalence survey. It provides information on the
substance abuse treatment system and its clients on the reference
date. Client counts reported here do not represent annual
totals. Rather, N-SSATS provides a "snapshot" of substance abuse
treatment facilities and clients on an average day. Through the year
2000, N-SSATS assigned October 1 as the reference date for facilities
to report data about their facility. In 2001, SAMHSA changed the
reference date to the last business day in March. This change helped
increase the timeliness of responses by individual facilities, but
resulted in no data being collected for the year of 2001. The year
2002 marked the first year data was collected using the new reference
date. The N-SSATS is sponsored by the Office of Applied Studies at
the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
|
|---|
