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drinkanddrugsnews
| January 2014
Resources |
Mutual aid
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
A new set of resources to support access to mutual aid has been
published by Public Health England.
DDN
reports
TOGETHER
SUPPORTIVE PEER RELATIONSHIPS
with people who’ve had similar
experiences are acknowledged as a
vital aspect of recovery from problem
drug and alcohol use, and Public
Health England (PHE) is keen to see
the treatment sector strengthen its
relationship with mutual aid
organisations.
A new range of PHE resources
aims to raise awareness of the
benefits of mutual aid among
commissioners, service managers and
their staff; and make sure clients are
taking full advantage of what’s
available. As well as a keyworker guide
to helping clients engage, there’s an
audit tool to enable commissioners to
determine local barriers to access,
and a briefing on the evidence base
for mutual aid’s role in supporting
recovery, drawing together findings
from previous key studies.
The resources were put together
through extensive collaboration with
mutual aid groups and providers over
the course of a year, and PHE also
plans to publish practical guides for
commissioners and service managers
in the spring. In the meantime,
however, the mainstream treatment
sector should be working to strengthen
its relationships with mutual aid
groups, the organisation urges.
‘What we would expect is that
providers automatically have good
engagement with mutual aid groups –
however many there are in their
locality – and well-developed pathways
between formal treatment services
and mutual aid,’ PHE’s director of
alcohol and drugs, Rosanna O’Connor,
tells
DDN
. This means that, rather
than just knowing about the groups or
giving out information, services should
be ‘actively seeking to support people
by making linkages with mutual aid,
helping them to participate and
sustaining interest’, she stresses. ‘So
where people attend for the first time
and maybe don’t particularly feel
comfortable in that group, they can
help them think again or help them
look at alternatives, depending on
what’s available.’
This is crucial, as accessing mutual
aid meetings for the first time can be
intimidating, she acknowledges. ‘For
any of us, going to something that’s
unusual and unknown can be like that.
It’s important that it’s as comfortable
and positive an experience as
possible, so that initial interest has
the potential to take off.’
Is awareness of the benefits of
mutual aid still low? ‘I think it’s higher
than it was because it’s been a
priority that we’ve been pushing for
over a year now,’ she says. ‘It’s been
high on our agenda, although of
course that’s been at a time of
substantial change within the field. So
it’s better than it was, if not as good
as we’d like it to be.’
In the appendix to the keyworkers
guide, there’s a series of handouts for
clients that debunk some myths
around mutual aid, such as the
religious aspect in relation to 12-step
fellowships. Are there are still a lot of
misconceptions out there? ‘I think
there are, and I think a number of us
would own up to having had those in
the past. There are those sort of
cultural or ideological hurdles that
some people feel they might have to
overcome, but there are a variety of
groups out there so if a good fit isn’t
found immediately then it’s worth
pursuing and looking elsewhere.’
While providers clearly need to be
familiar with the philosophies of the
different groups so they can point
people in the right direction – and
PHE has been working with some
groups to help them in terms of how
accessible they feel to newcomers –
should keyworkers be attending
meetings themselves to give them a
better insight into what it would be
like for their clients? ‘Whatever works
in each locality – we don’t want to be
prescriptive – but a level of
awareness of what happens at these
groups is good to have,’ she states.
Could mutual aid be one way of
addressing regional variations in
treatment outcomes?
‘Mutual aid is just one of the
component parts of a successful
treatment system, but it’s definitely
something that we would expect to be
in place. There’s good evidence that
it’s effective – for example, the
addition of just one abstinent person
to a drinker’s social network increases
the likelihood of abstinence in the
following year by 27 per cent. That’s
quite a remarkable statistic, so to me
it would seem mad if every locality
across the country wasn’t attempting
to achieve that potential difference.’
One of the key challenges facing
the sector now is the population of
entrenched opiate users aged over
40. Is this a group where good quality
peer support could potentially play a
vital role?
‘You would think so,’ she says.
‘You can never predict who’s going to
be successful and at what stage.
Most of us will have seen people who
we never imagined would survive going
on to be very successful in terms of
recovery, and service users will come
across people like that in every mutual
aid group or meeting they might go to.
To be able to see people in recovery
who they may well have known
themselves as users, or who they
know to have had very significant
problems, is hugely empowering and
gives people a vision of their own
recovery. We have got a very
challenging population in treatment
now who we’re looking to help recover,
so every little bit of the system that
can be tweaked to improve recovery
outcomes is what we’re after.
‘We’re talking about people whose
social networks, as they still exist, have
probably been part of the problem in
the past and part of the challenge that
they’re trying to overcome. So helping
people to create new networks of social
support is really important.’
Resources available free at:
www.nta.nhs.uk/mutualaidbriefing.aspx
www.nta.nhs.uk/Mutualaidselfassessm
ent.aspx
www.nta.nhs.uk/MutualaidFAMA.aspx
or for more information contact:
Miranda.Askew@phe.gov.uk
In it
‘You can never
predict who’s
going to be
successful and
at what stage...’
ROSANNA O’CONNOR