There are many health concerns in regards to the substance abuse population. Health care providers use different screening tools in order to diagnosis different substance abuse problems. Alcohol dependence is a chronic, progressive disease with no known cure, but there are many different treatments available. A popular screening tool used in healthcare settings is the AUDIT Questionnaire, which gives the patient a series of questions and rates their responses on a number system so that the patient does not adjust their answers. The patients answers are added up and the final number will determine if they have a less severe …show more content…
The DAST-10 uses ten questions with yes or no answers to assess for drug use, not including alcohol or tobacco, within the last year. Like the AUDIT questionnaire, the DAST-10 calculates the patient’s risk for drug abuse by adding up their score from the ten questions. (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2015). The AUDIT and DAST-10 are only two out of many types of screening tools used for substance abuse. As student nurses, assessment is a very crucial area that needs to be done very thorough in order to give an accurate nursing diagnosis and using these screening tools can help nurses be more