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A new, improved
State of
the sector
report is
underway and needs your
input, says
Paul Anders
LAST YEAR
DrugScope, on behalf of the Recovery Partnership, undertook
significant work to try to gauge the health and confidence of the adult
community and residential parts of the drug and/or alcohol treatment system.
The result was
State of the sector 2013
. Through a variety of means – an
online questionnaire, regional events and telephone interviews – service
managers and other stakeholders were encouraged to provide information
about the condition of their services, how they’d coped with a period of
significant change, how their partnership work was faring and what their
outlook for the future was.
The resulting report gained significant traction. It received widespread
coverage in both the specialist press like
DDN
and
Druglink
, but also in the
broader voluntary and public service press, as well as being quoted by
mainstream newspapers such as the
Independent
. It garnered ministerial
interest through the Inter-Ministerial Group on Drugs, and Public Health
England (PHE) took some of the key findings from the report as a mandate to
prioritise housing and employment in its 2014-15 work plan.
The findings painted a picture of a sector in a state of flux. While there was
little in the 2013 survey to cause particular alarm, many responses indicated that
the process of change, driven both by changes to local authority funding and to
the way that drug and alcohol services are commissioned, had only just started.
SOME KEY FINDINGS INCLUDED:
•
No clear evidence of widespread disinvestment in treatment. Many
respondents reported an actual or anticipated decrease in funding, but
others reported an increase, albeit sometimes as a result of gaining business
due to local authorities rolling smaller contracts together.
•
Many respondents indicated that they were engaging with features of the
post-2013 commissioning landscape like Health and Wellbeing Boards and
police and crime commissioners.
•
Respondents indicated that they were having difficulty in supporting people
to accrue ‘recovery capital’, with employment and housing particularly
problematic but some problems also being experienced around access to
mental health support.
•
Many participants were concerned about the potentially harmful and
disruptive effects of frequent recommissioning and retendering.
Despite these challenges and more, most respondents were relatively positive
about the future and some provided examples of how they’d changed their way of
working to improve services, manage costs or improve partnerships.
LOOKING FORWARD
For 2014,
State of the sector
has been substantially revised, both to reflect the
learning from 2013 and also to significantly broaden the scope of the work.
While in 2013 we limited the survey to service managers from adult
community and residential services, in 2014 we will be extending
State of the
sector
to prison services and young people’s services. DrugScope has
consulted widely with service providers, government departments, PHE and
other key stakeholders to ensure that the questionnaires accurately reflect the
characteristics of each part of the sector and the issues that they face.
The adult community and residential questionnaire has also been
developed from last year’s, although changes have been kept to a minimum in
the interests of being able to make comparisons with results from 12 months
ago. By repeating the exercise, we aim to be able to learn – and say more
about the pace of change and direction of travel, building on the baseline of
State of the sector 2013
.
However, while we were delighted with the response in 2013 when around
170 services responded, we would like to hear from even more this year,
making the findings even more persuasive and useful to the policy-makers who
in the end decide where to invest public funds.
We acknowledge that the questionnaires are quite lengthy, as we’re keen to
capture a wide range of treatment and non-treatment related activity. To make it
easier to complete, you may find it useful to have details of the following to hand:
•
The number of clients accessing your service
•
Details of your funding and the length of your contract
•
Your clients’ support needs
•
Any other services you work in partnership with, and
•
To what extent your clients are able to access other specialist services.
All responses are entirely confidential, and there is no editorialising. While
DrugScope can’t guarantee every comment a participant makes will be
included in the final report, we take care to ensure that what is included is
representative.
The State of the sector 2014 surveys will be launched in September. If you
would like to discuss any aspect of the project, please contact Paul Anders at
DrugScope – paul.anders@drugscope.org.uk. You can find the main and
summary reports of State of the Sector 2013 here:
http://www.drugscope.org.uk/POLICY+TOPICS/StateoftheSector2013
Paul Anders is senior policy officer at DrugScope
WHAT STATE AREWE IN?
Services |
Survey
8 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| September 2013
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘While there was little in
the 2013 survey to cause
particular alarm, many
responses indicated that
the process of change...
had only just started.’