Effectiveness Bank Course on Drug Treatment Research
COURSE ON DRUG TREATMENT RESEARCH REACHES ITS CONCLUSION
This instalment ends the 2018 refresh of the Drug Treatment Matrix, reminding you of the issues addressed in its five rows (listed below) intersected by five columns stepping up in widening circles from specific interventions though practitioners to their managers, organisations, and the local treatment systems of which they form a part. Released fortnightly, the 25 cells cumulated to a course reflecting on the most significant research evaluating and guiding harm reduction and treatment practice. All 25 remain available for you to dip in to by clicking on cells in the matrix or on the row headings below.
See the whole matrix at:
http://findings.org.uk/PHP/dl.php?f=dmatrix.php&s=ml
OR
go to your chosen row below.
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Row 1: FIRST TASK: SAVE LIVES, REDUCE HARM
Prompted by HIV, from the start of modern-day harm reduction it was recognised that engaging active drug users meant accepting them on their own terms. Yet also from the start, generating health-promoting and addiction-ending change was on the agenda – a core tension which forms a common theme across the five cells.
Row 2: CROSS-MODALITY FUNDAMENTALS
The five cells in this row offer an opportunity to reconsider what treatment is all about and how to make it better. The journey takes in the meaning of ‘recovery’, worker-client relationships (“the heart of addiction treatment”), the ubiquitous stages of change model, what makes treatment services engaging, and payment-by-results funding mechanisms.
Among the issues explored: whether medications can make it too easy to recover; bridging the chasm between legal drug prescribers and their illegally using patients; “ethos, dose, and organisation” – the three pillars of medication-based treatment; what a good service looks like.
Row 4: PSYCHOSOCIAL THERAPIES: TALKING ROADS TO RECOVERY
Learn about Carl Rogers’ seminal work, the pros and cons of organisational change driven by money, why being genuine sometimes means breaking the ‘rules’ and effective therapy is not just a matter of being nice, and the importance of post-training ‘coaching’. Asks whether mutual aid is the only feasible way to do more (recovery) with less (money), and if residential rehabilitation should remain a ‘last resort’.
Row 5: REDUCING CRIME, PROTECTING FAMILIES
A common theme is the contradictions involved in offering or imposing treatment within a system which sees the patient essentially as a threat. Asks: is it ever safe to leave children to live with problem drug users; whether to protect children, treatment services must become family services; do coercion and/or collaboration with enforcement undermine treatment’s community protection impacts; is it true that the trickier the situation, the more the practitioner matters.
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Findings is supported by Alcohol Research UK and the Society for the Study of Addiction and advised by the National Addiction Centre.