Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
Dame Carol Black’s Review of Drugs provides a detailed overview of treatment and the factors associated with ensuring recovery from dependence.
The belated final evaluation of the drug and alcohol PbR recovery pilots found they were expensive, delayed treatment entry & had fewer treatment completions.
Inspirado is a board game used as an interactive brief intervention tool to support players gain an understanding of recovery and behaviour change.
New research from Breaking Free Online explores the increasing use of online resources to support recovery from drug and alcohol dependence.
Some reported that PbR created opportunities for increased creativity and flexibility in the way in which services were designed and delivered. PbR had also encouraged a greater emphasis on monitoring and reviewing the progress of those in treatment. However the emphasis on measuring progress solely in terms of the PbR outcomes was both extremely costly and time-consuming but also had the potential to alter and
In my view, implementing rapid sanctions alone is unlikely to promote reduced drug use or offending. Desistance and recovery rarely involve a simple, linear path to success. If every relapse is met with 5 days in custody, it is hard to envisage how offenders will achieve the long term stability and abstinence required to build a personally fulfilling and law-abiding lifestyle.
Measuring drug recovery is problematic, to say the least. Recovery from drug dependence is, like desistance from crime, rarely a linear process and typically includes lapse and relapse over many years. Different people choose different recovery goals: some people remain abstinent from all substances for life; others continue to use occasionally; or replace drug dependence with a reliance on alcohol.
Complexity is almost always the enemy of effective PbR because it inevitably results in unintended consequences. Concern about possible unintended consequences results in worries about gaming the system which, equally inevitably, results in additional measures being taken to address these concerns which involves further complexity which…, well, you get the picture. In this post, I want to make the case for simple, robust measures to assess how effective PbR schemes are in meeting their outcomes.
Most payment by results pilot schemes are targeted at entrenched social problems. These problems – troubled families, long term unemployment, re-offending and drug dependency – are complex by nature. They require a coordinated response which addresses a wide range of issues. PbR funded interventions are a natural commissioning approach to tackle complex problems. However, PbR schemes quickly run into trouble when the outcomes themselves become complex.
In this latest in a series of short video interviews on payment by results, Nicola Singleton from the UK Drug Policy Commission gives her views
Not everything that counts can be counted… The first challenge of payment by results schemes is to set the right outcomes. The second is to
Measuring recovery The biggest challenge of the drug recovery payment by results pilots has been agreeing a simple but robust measurement system to report on whether
