Understanding the Landscape of Behavioral Health Pre-service Training to Inform Evidence-Based Intervention Implementation

Reports on the behavioral health workforce highlight the need to enhance evidence-based capacity; evidence-based interventions incorporated into pre-service graduate curricula (coursework and fieldwork) are needed to meet this goal. Improving educational practices across pre-service settings will require understanding of and careful attention to the contextual factors that exert pressure on curricula. The authors believe efforts to change educational practices can be enhanced by application of implementation science principles. This Open Forum delineates the key contextual factors that influence pre-service education, highlights gaps in the literature, and proposes an agenda for future research at the intersection of behavioral health workforce development and implementation science.