Patients with hazardous and harmful drinking patterns are commonly encountered by primary care clinicians worldwide. Studies from the U.S., Europe and Australia indicate that 10–40% of patients seen in primary care settings engage in hazardous or harmful drinking [
1‐
5]. This group of patients, sometimes referred to as "risky drinkers," includes patients who meet diagnostic criteria for alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence, as well as patients who exceed recommended "safe drinking guidelines" of the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and are at increased risk for alcohol-related problems [
2]. Numerous randomized controlled trials have demonstrated that screening and brief intervention (SBI) are effective in reducing alcohol consumption among such drinkers [
6‐
8], yet SBI still remains underutilized in primary care practices. Several older studies, many of them based on chart review data, suggested that problem drinking (PD) was largely undetected and untreated in primary care [
9‐
12]. Two recent studies using other measurement techniques (clinician exit questionnaires and direct observation) have indicated that discussions of alcohol use by clinicians and patients in primary care are more frequent than previously thought, occurring in 9–10% of primary care encounters [
13,
14]. Nonetheless, studies conducted in the U.S., Australia, the United Kingdom and Finland indicate that clinicians frequently fail to screen for PD, and fail to address PD in at least one-third to one-half of cases, even when the diagnosis is known [
13,
15‐
20]. Indeed, 72% of U.S. primary physicians surveyed in 1999 reported that they preferred not to counsel early problem drinkers themselves but rather to refer them to a nurse trained in behavioural interventions [
21]. Residents are less likely to perform brief interventions than faculty physicians [
22], and only 13–20% of problem drinkers report receiving advice to reduce drinking, a key element of most effective SBI programs [
17,
22,
23]. While studies have demonstrated that providing experiential training can increase primary care clinicians' rates of providing brief advice to problem drinkers [
24‐
27], studies of the effect of resident training have yielded mixed results [
28,
29]. We previously reported initial findings from the Healthy Habits Project, a training program designed to increase SBI rates in a family medicine residency program using a combination of clinician training and clinic systems intervention. Based primarily on chart review, findings indicated that following program implementation, alcohol interventions increased from 12.5% to 47.7% of patients who screened positive for hazardous and harmful drinking, and that clinicians who were prompted with positive screening results gave advice to reduce drinking to 72% of patients [
30]. This report provides further information, obtained using clinician exit questionnaires, regarding the impact of this SBI training program on resident and faculty physician alcohol intervention attitudes and behaviours. We hypothesized that the SBI training program would result in the following changes for both resident and faculty clinicians: (1) greater recognition of PD, (2) increased certainty in identifying PD, and (3) increased advice to reduce drinking.