Recent bulletins from the 
drug and alcohol bank:
How many drinkers should be in treatment?
One of our selection of hot topics – important issues which sometimes generate heated debate over the facts or their interpretation. What proportion of the UK’s problem drinkers are in treatment, how far does that fall short of the number who should be – and how do we judge ‘should’? Depending on where you draw the line, performance ranges from abysmal to excellent.
Is it futile to match alcohol treatments to the patient?
It was the great hope for alcohol treatment: even if overall one therapy was no better than another, surely this was just because each worked best with different patients? Getting the match right was seen as a key way to advance effectiveness. Millions of US research dollars did not find the expected formula, but from this failure emerged a radical understanding of treatment and new ways of matching it to the patient.
There can hardly be a more emotive and (since a US-inspired project came to Britain offering to pay drug users to be sterilised) more contentious issue: how to protect the million or more children of problem substance users. Despite its profile, truly informative studies are few, but include promising evaluations of specialist British services.
See here for the previously released Findings alcohol treatment matrix, detailing a wide range of intervention and treatment evidence and guidance analysis.
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