Abstract

--- - "Introduction: Traditional treatment programs for substance use disorder (SUD) tend to be male-dominated en-vironments, which can negatively affect women's access to treatment and related outcomes. Women's specific treatment needs have led some providers to develop women-only SUD treatment programs in several countries. In Chile, women-only programs were only fully implemented in 2010. We compared treatment outcomes and readmission risk for adult women admitted to state-funded women-only versus mixed-gender SUD treatment programs in Chile." - "Methods: We used a registry-based retrospective cohort design of adult women in women-only (N = 8200) and mixed-gender (N = 13,178) SUD treatment programs from 2010 to 2019. The study obtained data from the National Drug and Alcohol Service from Chile. We used a multistate model to estimate the probabilities of experiencing treatment completion, discharge without completion (i.e., patient-initiated discharge and admin-istrative discharge), or readmission, as well as the likelihood of being readmitted, conditioned on prior treatment outcome. We adjusted models for multiple baseline characteristics (e.g., substance use, socioeconomic)." - "Results: Overall, 24% of women completed treatment and 54% dropped out of treatment. The proportion of patient-initiated discharges within the first three month was larger in women-only than in mixed-gender pro-grams (19% vs. 12%). In both programs, women who completed treatment were more likely to experience readmission at three months, and one and three years. In the long term, women in the women-only programs were more likely to complete treatment than women in mixed-gender programs (34% vs. 23%, respectively). The readmission probability was higher among women who previously completed treatment than those who had a discharge without completion (40% vs 21% among women in women-only programs; 38% vs. 19% among women in mixed-gender programs, respectively); no differences occurred in the risk of readmission between women-only and mixed-gender programs." - "Conclusions: In terms of treatment outcomes and readmission risk, women-only programs had similar results to mixed-gender programs in Chile. The added value of these specialized programs should be addressed in further research."