alcohol services – Humankind

Tag: alcohol services

Dorset Council residents continue to be supported for drug and alcohol use

Jasmine Rocks

REACH Weymouth team stood outside their hub.

REACH, which is part of our new South West region, has been successful in winning the contract to provide Dorset Council’s alcohol and drug support service for another eight years.  

REACH has been delivering excellent care and support for the people of Dorset since 2017. This announcement means that they can continue to embed themselves in local communities and provide a bespoke drug and alcohol service to people when and where they most need it. The recommissioning announcement is a validation of the high regard with which the service is held and all the hard work, professionalism and expertise of staff and volunteers.  

This is the best outcome for the people who need support for their drug and alcohol use in Dorset. Recommissioning REACH gives people who use our services much needed stability of treatment and continuity of care.  

Cllr Jane Somper, Dorset Council Adult Social Care and Health Portfolio Holder said: “We are delighted to be able to award REACH the contract to deliver drugs and alcohol support services in the Dorset Council area. 

“We have had a great partnership so far and we look forward to continuing to deliver services together to help those residents who need support with substance misuse. 

“It is also great news that those residents in our treatment services already will see no difference in their current recovery journeys with having REACH continue their fantastic work in the county. 

The new contract starts on 1 November 2023, and remains a fully integrated service for young people, adults and families. The service for young people under the age of 25 is run in partnership with Essential Drug and Alcohol Service (EDAS) and clinical delivery is led by Avon and Wiltshire Partnership Trust (AWP).

There is a specialist family team within REACH that works with the whole family. In addition, the service works in harmony with Dorset Social Care and NHS England through the Safeguarding Families Together team and the Mental Health Treatment Requirement service. 

Ted Haughey, Executive Director of Operations at Humankind, said: “This is great news for Dorset. REACH is a service that is genuinely embedded in and part of its local community. In March, Humankind launched an ambitious five year strategy, Being Human, which contains the three key themes of people, partnerships and place. REACH embodies our commitment to the provision of bespoke services woven into Dorset’s community fabric and shaped around the needs of local people. There is rightly a genuine hope, optimism and excitement about REACH’s future.”  

Humankind is a national charity which supports over 90,000 people every year. Our services stretch from Dorchester to Durham, supporting people’s complex health and social needs. As part of a larger organisation, REACH now benefits from connection, innovation and learning from Newton Aycliffe to Newton Abbot.  

REACH has developed a close partnership with Dorset Council over the past six years and prior to that ten years becoming embedded in the local community through innovative projects such as the first peer mentor programme in the South in 2009. This project became an accredited programme in 2011, as well as becoming the second service in England to offer postal naloxone through the web based NSPDirect service.

REACH was also the first service to offer postal Dry Blood Spot Testing (DBST) in partnership with the NHSAlliance and Hep C U Later Campaign which was just one small part of REACH’s exceptional covid response plans.  

“REACH has an ambitious vision of continuous improvement for the communities of Dorset in the coming years” said Beth Davies who leads the REACH service in Dorset. “We will maintain excellence in all our contractual and Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) targets. REACH’s end of year performance report reflects a picture of exceptional outcomes. We have met and exceeded all our contractual targets within the Humankind quality and performance framework, reaching the highest level of performance across all key indicators. We will be building upon these solid foundations, developing accessibility to services and innovative partnerships.”

To contact REACH please call 0800 043 4656 or visit www.edp.org.uk/reach.

News

Remodelling our alcohol support

Jack Keery

A blog post detailing our review and subsequent remodelling of the support we provide to people accessing our services for alcohol related issues, by Stacey Smith, Director of Nursing, and Oliver Standing, Director of Communications & External Affairs.

Dame Carol Black’s recent Independent Review of Drugs shone a welcome light on services for people struggling with their drug use. Happily, it led to a new Drug Strategy and much-needed increase in resourcing for our treatment and recovery systems (albeit during a cost of living crisis). Whilst these changes have benefited some people with alcohol support needs due to the integrated nature of many services, alcohol in and of itself was not including in the scope of the review.

When it comes to supporting people with alcohol problems, as a society, we have never got it right. Alcohol harm has been frustratingly over-looked by successive governments. Over four in five people in England drinking at dependent levels remain outside our support systems. Alcohol related deaths have tragically rocketed in recent years, increasing 27.4% from 2019 to 2021.

At Humankind we are proud of our work in response to this challenge, but we aren’t complacent about the levels of need that still exist. Our DrinkCoach online support platform has delivered almost 1,000 coaching sessions in the last year, with over 21,000 people receiving identification and brief advice (IBA) in the same period through its online test. Our All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) last week brought together parliamentarians in Westminster to hear from the Association of Directors of Public Health’s drug and alcohol lead Alice Wiseman and other speakers on reducing alcohol related harms.

For Alcohol Awareness Week this year, we are proud to say that we have taken the next step in our organisational response.

Alarmed by the increasing number of alcohol related deaths, low numbers of community detoxifications and increasing complexity in the support needs of older people accessing services, we brought together a multi-disciplinary team within Humankind to discuss and review our alcohol support options.

The group recommended greater focus on the full complexity of physical and mental health needs, as well as those of our diverse populations, a broader focus on alcohol treatment as a specialism and a new look at how we see access and engagement particularly from the viewpoint of people using services.

As a result, we have fully redesigned our alcohol support journeys for people entering our services, incorporating evidenced based tools for assessment and a range of treatment options based on need, choice, and health. We have recognised that we need to work differently, ensuring we develop partnerships to support the varied levels of treatment options, from harm reduction advice and information to brief interventions and community detoxification. We have developed specific pathways for older people and those in the criminal justice system.

Whilst this certainly won’t ‘fix’ our support systems in one go, it does feel like an important step forward.

Our early adopter sites in Bradford, Cumbria and London are now implementing the new model and generating the real-world findings we will need to update and optimise it for the rest of our services. Haringey’s HAGA is continuing its proud tradition of innovation in response to alcohol, which has existed since 1981. As the new pathways embed and evolve throughout Humankind, we will collect and share our learning, culminating in a Year One report published in Alcohol Awareness Week 2024.

Please do get in touch if you would like to learn more about the project. By working on structures within Humankind itself we aim to model some of the changes we would like to also see at a system level. There are multiple ways to bring those about, and we are proud to advocate alongside colleagues through the Alcohol Health Alliance, as well as via our APPG.

It is our hope that the welcome recent focus on drugs can be broadened to cover alcohol and that this, and successive, governments can demonstrate the leadership necessary to develop a comprehensive and strategic approach to reducing alcohol related harm and increasing levels of effective support.

News