‘S
ervices are now expected to do more
with less while caring for individuals
with increasingly complex needs,’ said
Carole Sharma, chief executive of the
Federation of Drug and Alcohol
Professionals, opening FDAP’s annual conference for
workers in the sector.
So how could we drive workforce development to
make sure that it was relevant and effective?
First up was a well-known figure, Paul Hayes –
formerly head of the National Treatment Agency (NTA)
and now leading Collective Voice, representing
treatment providers.
‘If we’re despondent about the state of the sector,
odds are we’re going to be under-serving people,’ he
said. ‘People say to me, can’t we have the NTA back –
people who wanted to hang them from the nearest
lamppost… but we have to get much smarter at
tapping into a new narrative.’
Commissioners needed to be driving innovation
and we had to make sure people had the skills to
deliver. ‘We need to focus relentlessly on delivering
outcomes,’ he said. ‘The most significant challenge for
all of us is deaths – they’re going up very rapidly. We
have to be ready to change our practice.’
Hayes acknowledged the climate of uncertainty,
with no sign yet of when the drug strategy would
come out.
‘Is all this easy and comfortable? No. But it is
possible and necessary,’ he said, adding ‘If you think
we’re all going to hell in a handcart, get out of this
game.’
‘Nothing was ever positively done from
despondency,’ said Pete Burkinshaw of Public Health
England (PHE), who was keen to emphasise the
sector’s ‘rich evidence base’. Another reason to be
cheerful was localism, he said, as it ‘makes all of you
much more important’.
But with a growing cohort of people with complex
needs, we had to develop specific competencies to
manage the risks faced by service users.
‘Your doors need to be wide open to engage with
need,’ he said. ‘Services can’t be a reflection of what we
do, what we’re comfortable with and have always
done. What you need is workers who have techniques
and have belief in those techniques.’
As well as a set of universal core skills, workers
needed meta competencies – and to ‘know when and
where to do and not do things’ – an important
element of adaptive and purposeful treatment.
FDAP had asked two of the larger treatment
agencies how they prepared an effective workforce, so
the conference heard from David Bamford from
Change, Grow, Live (CGL, formerly CRI) and Guy Pink
from Addaction.
Pink believed it was ‘a really good time to be in the
sector’ and described Addaction’s guiding principles as
being ‘collaborative, ethical, inspiring, resilient and self
challenging’ – ‘a team-based approach’.
‘We want people to be driven by integrity,’ he said,
‘so we recruit and manage against these guiding
principles.’
The organisation was constantly reviewing
challenges and solutions, looking at different patterns
of working and ways of increasing productivity.
‘We’re doing more for less, but we have a good pool
of workers,’ he said, emphasising that they did not
want to be among the two thirds of the workforce
who were disengaged. ‘We all know that people don’t
16 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| July/August 2016
FDAP CONFERENCE
PETE BURKINSHAW, PHE
NEW PARADIGMS
We need to go beyond
training to tackle
workforce development,
says Professor
Ann Roche
T
he workforce is without doubt
the most important element in
addressing alcohol and other
drug (AOD) related problems.
Without an appropriately skilled,
competent and confident workforce
able to execute evidence-based
interventions and policies the AOD
sector will always be hampered in its
efforts to prevent and ameliorate the
ever changing array of issues. Ensuring
that our services, programmes and
policies offer best available options
requires our workforce to be able to
function to maximum effectiveness in
increasingly challenging environments.
Traditional thinking has relied
heavily on training as a mechanism by
which to achieve optimal service
delivery, but while training is a
necessary component in this complex
picture, it is insufficient in itself.
Research increasingly indicates major
flaws in the ‘train and hope’ approach
to knowledge transfer and innovation
dissemination. That is, training often
fails to deliver the ultimate expectation
and goal – ie behaviour change. This is
through no fault of the individual
worker, as a multitude of factors are at
CAROLE SHARMA, FDAP
PAUL HAYES,
Collective Voice
How can we develop our work-
force against a backdrop of cuts
and challenges?
DDN
reports
from the FDAP conference
Force
