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Feeling good about who I am!!

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Recovery has given me the ability to love myself and work hard to help others. I love what we get to do at Interventions on Demand

We change lives for the better! No matter whether we do pro bono work, fundraise for beds for treatment or privately provide services to our most vulnerable people and their families.

I feel good about the opportunity and honoured to each family or individual that allows us to help.

So… tonight we attended TWC’s annual gala and we were reminded and reflected on the power of this disease of addiction and the losses we all share collectively. Stacy Wilson is a force to be reckoned with.! His heart is in the right place ; my hat is off to him.

Treatment matching in an opioid crisis

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Interventions are not cut and dried and we as professionals need to understand the current crisis and impact of our recommendations. Most Interventions take time and I include months of case management to truly be there for these families.

Each year 2.5 million individuals received services from an ever-increasing range of “specialty services,” for substance abuse.  In Canada & United States, more than 14,500 specialized drug treatment facilities provide counselling, behavioral therapy, medication, case management, and other types of services to persons with substance use disorders.

In the past it was usual practice to assign people to treatment programs without a lot of real investigation into their exact needs. decisions were made based on the reputation of the treatment option, and the willingness of the individual to go along with the suggestion. this led to situations where people entered programs that may not have been suitable and that they were less successful in their recovery as a result of the wrong treatment.

To be most effective, phases of treatment should be considered not as a fixed series of steps that are assigned specific time frames, but rather as a dynamic continuum that allows each client to progress according to his or her individual needs. Clients move through a particular phase gradually or rapidly, depending on a variety of bio psycho-social factors that are discussed in assessment.

Treatment outcomes should be evaluated not solely in terms of how many phases the client has moved through, but rather by the degree to which the needs, goals, and expectations would be met by the treatment program.

Our clients today are becoming more complex in terms of getting them the right treatment and there are many considerations and variables in making the best treatment recommendations.

img_9935As Interventionists we need to be well informed. We are sometimes the first point of contact with a professional and there is no guarantee that addicts who relapse will ever make another attempt at recovery. it is therefore crucial that the individual get the best possible treatment. A one size fits all approach will mean that the treatment offered may only be a good fit for some. Client treatment matching is routinely used for all health conditions, so it seems reasonable that we should approach addictions the same way.

If you understand the stages of change and the motivation it takes to complete treatment, then I will sometimes work with the family for a while to help them prepare and practice their choices and managing the addiction and help the client become more willing to adhere to a solid treatment program that they need.

Example: 3 months ago I was hired to do intervention on a family and it was evident that the client would probably not accept the help and needed to try on her own to address her addiction and I continued to work with the family for the duration of this process, the client did fairly well in making some changes but was clearly untreated. She fell off the plan yesterday and we Intervened with her through an invitational family meeting and she was told that,  I was hired three months ago and we did not intervene at that time to respect her willingness to try it on her own. She accepted the treatment last night because she knew her family loved her and gave her the autonomy to try.  Ethically I give 3 options for treatment and because she has a job we are first going with the out patient treatment with the understanding that is she does not adhere that she is saying she will then go to residential program offered to her.

 

An Interventionists Approach to matching the “right treatment “in an Opioid Crisis

Best Practice in Treatment Matching,

Best Practice in Screening & Assessment,

Best Practice in Ethical Considerations