Alcohol treatment course
Whatever your role or level of experience in the field, the alcohol treatment matrix provides a great opportunity to be a student of addiction. Explore the matrix in your own time or sign up to the Drug and Alcohol Findings mailing list to follow the course in fortnightly instalments.
Subscribers have recently developed their understanding of a core public health strategy: screening and brief alcohol interventions (documented in row 1 of the alcohol treatment matrix). Part prevention and part treatment, these programmes are intended to identify risky drinkers at locations such as GP’s surgeries and emergency departments and then to deliver brief advice to reduce risk. Do they work well enough, and can they be implemented widely enough to reduce alcohol-related harm across a population?
How treatment ‘works’
Coming up in row 2 of the alcohol treatment matrix are the generic and cross-cutting issues at the heart of treatment – what treatment is for, how it ‘works’, and who needs it. Is treatment a socially endorsed way to get better, which works because we believe it works? Are the interventions doing the work, or is it the patient? Are incentive systems such as payment-by-results destructive or liberating?
View the page that houses the alcohol treatment matrix and consider joining our mailing list to receive email reminders about the course and other content from Drug and Alcohol Findings about responses to drug and alcohol problems.
By Natalie Davies, co-editor of Drug and Alcohol Findings
