Recovery Partnership Quality Standard Frameworks
A set of quality standards have been released by the Recovery Partnership to support the delivery of community and residential treatment services, and to set out the outcomes service users and commissioners can expect services to offer.
The Recovery Partnership was formed in May 2011 to provide a collective voice for the treatment sector on the ambitions set out in the 2010 Drug Strategy.
The standards were developed to reflect the focus on a treatment journey for service users based on identifying and developing 'recovery capital', as defined in the Drug Strategy as “the resources necessary to start, and sustain recovery from drug and alcohol dependence.”
The Quality Standard Framework is structured in the following thematic sections:
- Clinical Interventions
- Quality of practice
- Supporting Recovery
- Service user and family member, carers and significant others involvement
- Staff management and development
The standards were developed through consultation with the sector and were piloted by ten drug and alcohol services. They also build upon the new regulations and Key Lines of Enquiry introduced by Care Quality Commission (CQC) whose remit extended to cover substance misuse services in 2014.
Last year the Recovery Partnership commissioned a review of alcohol treatment in England highlighting key issues and themes facing the sector, and released a subsequent briefing on the need to engage more alcohol misusers through new approaches.
Alcohol and drugs JSNA support pack
In September Public Health England released the latest in the annually updated joint strategic needs assessment (JSNA) support packs to assist local authorities in commissioning alcohol and drug services. The support packs 'will help local areas to develop JSNAs and local joint health and wellbeing strategies, which effectively address public health issues relating to alcohol, and drug use'.
See the alcohol harm prevention, treatment and recovery for adults JSNA support pack documents:
- Good practice prompts for planning comprehensive interventions in 2017-18 [pdf]
- Key data for planning effective alcohol harm prevention, treatment and recovery in 2017-18 [pdf]
- Alcohol and drugs prevention, treatment and recovery: why invest? [pdf]
See here for further JSNA resources including substance prevention for young people and adult treatment.
Further resources
A comprehensive set of NICE alcohol guidance and resources are also available, including Quality Standard 11 for treatment services and supporting commissioning guidance and tools.
NICE have also previously released Public Health Guidance for local authorities, and the Alcohol Learning Centre also includes pages highlighting data tools and commissioning. An alcohol Identification and Brief Advice (IBA) commissioning toolkit was released last year by the South London Health Innovation Network (HIN).
The Findings Drug & Alcohol bank has a series of entries exploring treatment services as well as the alcohol matrix and commissioning evidence.
More guidance - less services?
Commissioners though may feel that guidance is only of so much use when financial pressures continue to mount. Local Authority public health teams, who have responsibility for commissioning drug and alcohol services, are facing year on year cuts - deemed a false economy by the King's Fund and the Health Select Committee. As such, warnings have been made that 46% of local authorities plan cuts to alcohol treatment services in 2015-16, rising to 72% in 2016-17.
As yet, the last annual treatment statistics have continued to show a small but steady increase in the number of people accessing alcohol treatment. However as with changes in alcohol consumption and hospital admission data, a lag effect may soon become evident.
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