Profile |
Vivienne Evans
April 2012 |
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it in policy and practice, because not every troubled family will have a drug
and alcohol problem. If you try to pigeonhole it then it doesn’t work.’
Family support should be ‘everybody’s business’, she believes. ‘Teachers
should be aware of it, social workers, people who work in old people’s homes
– everybody should be thinking about how they can support the family, but
being really clear about their underlying principle. Are they supporting the
family to support a user, or in their own right, or is it about parental
substance misuse and safeguarding? If they’ve got that right then the right
interventions will follow.’
While increasing awareness of family issues since the 2008 strategy –
and 2003’s landmark Hidden harm report before it – meant that the statutory
sector and large treatment providers became more interested in family
issues, there was a knock-on effect for the rest of the sector, she explains. ‘It
meant a dilution of the small, local voluntary groups that were set up – like
Adfam – by people with personal experience, whether that was people
providing one-to-one support or telephone helplines from their kitchen. Now,
because of the push towards volunteering and communities taking up these
issues – rather than relying on the state to provide it – there’s more of a role
for us to help local groups respond to that central agenda.’
Commissioning changes and the move to Public Health England mean
major challenges, and service provision for families is clearly no different.
‘When the money was around that was reflected in the increasing number of
services for families and children,’ she says. ‘Now that’s gone the central
driver has also gone, so the challenge for us is to support local groups and
family services to influence local commissioning arrangements.’
Clearly, as the NTA acknowledges, drugs and alcohol are not going to be a
priority for every local authority and every director of public health. ‘There are
an increasing number of organisations saying, “our campaigning message is
that these people are stigmatised and hidden and they need specialist help
around drugs and alcohol and family support”,’ she says. ‘It isn’t just a
matter of putting it all into ‘troubled families’ or a generic parents’ group.
There’s a need for some specialism, but there’s also a political and financial
reality about trying to make sure that more and more people across all
services recognise that drugs and alcohol can be a key issue and that they
need to be trained up to deal with it.’
She’s consistently argued that stigma is something that extends to
families – does she feel there’s more awareness and acknowledgement of
that now, or is there still a lot of work to be done? ‘I think that’s the next
thing that Adfam needs to do – to really bang on about that even more. We’ve
been saying it for years, particularly around alcohol, and the effect that can
have in a subliminal way on families is often quite acute. So it’s about getting
people to talk about alcohol in the family. When I first started working in
health education, going back nearly 40 years, we used to go to factories in
the lunch break and talk to women about breast self-examinations and
getting cervical smears and it was really difficult, because people just didn’t
talk about cancer. Now we can talk about cancer but we don’t seem to be
able to talk about the impact alcohol is having on families.’
*****
Viv Evans came to Adfam from DrugScope where she’d headed up a joint
education and prevention project with Alcohol Concern, and – apart from a brief
period as a teacher – she’s always been in the health sector, starting as health
education officer for Leicestershire County Council in the early ’70s. ‘The job was
to promote health messages, sticking up leaflets about sexually-transmitted
diseases in toilets,’ she says. ‘And, from a systems point of view, it’s very much
gone back to that now – it was a population issue, about promoting public health.’
Health education led her to Tacade where she was involved in preventing drug
and alcohol misuse among young people, and, increasingly, parental work. She
joined the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in 2000 and was part of the
working group that produced Hidden harm, which proved highly significant not
just for the sector but also for her. ‘I was able to bring that into Adfam,’ she
says. ‘There was a lot of direct work then but over the years I’ve tried to take
things in a direction that’s much more around prevention and generic issues –
whole family issues and looking to see where drugs and alcohol fits into that.’
A defining moment was getting funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
in 2009 which allowed Adfam to set up its campaigning, research and
communications functions and become an umbrella organisation able to provide
training and policy briefings as well as guide other groups in the family support
sector – who can sometimes feel as isolated as those they help. How would she
like the charity to look five years from now?
‘I’d like us to be financially stable and to have helped more families to get help,
in whatever way that is,’ she says. ‘I’d like to think that whoever you were, if you’d
got a problem you’d be able to get that help from somewhere – maybe from a GP,
maybe from a specialist service. It may be that you just need some information, or
you’d benefit from a much more structured and therapeutic intervention. Whatever
your need is, I’d like those family members to get that support.’
She was awarded the OBE in 2008 – how did that feel? ‘Surprising,’ she
laughs. ‘And an excuse to get a new frock and have a celebration. I was really
pleased for Adfam and the sector that the issues I feel passionate about had
been recognised – that was nice.’
The challenge the organisation faces now is to continue to make its case,
she stresses. ‘I think our role is absolutely vital and necessary, but if you’re
not a big service provider it can be difficult as that tends to be where a lot of
the money is going in the voluntary sector – understandably so.
‘I think it’s kind of about “keep calm and carry on” now, really. We have to
continue to support small local groups while also recognising that if the direction of
travel and finance and government policy is towards recovery and the big treatment
providers then we’ve got to be flexible enough to recognise that too.’
DDN
Adfam chief executive Vivienne Evans talks to David Gilliver
about the challenges facing family support in a world of tight
budgets and political change