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drinkanddrugsnews
| March 2013
Be the change |
Service user conference 2013
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘If
you’re on heroin, you have all the attributes that an employer is
looking for,’ stresses Mhairi Doyle. ‘Your time management skills
are second-to-none, you get on with people, you’re inventive, you
can look at situations and find the best way around them. So all
we ever did with people was to show them this – show themwhat
they can do, instead of going on about what they can’t do.’
Recently retired, she spent 25 years at the Department for Work and Pensions
(DWP) and its forerunners, much of it helping people with drug problems in Liverpool
into employment. ‘I loved it,’ she says. ‘I thought I had the best job in the world.’
Crucially, it was easy for her to empathise with her clients and their situation. ‘I’d
been in AA – I’m going to be 27 years sober this month – and when I started work in
the department I was nine months sober,’ she says. ‘I started as an admin assistant
and progressed up the food chain.’
She was soon promoted, and with three children to support she sat the executive
officer exam and became a claimant adviser. ‘In those days claimant advisers were
seen more as social workers,’ she says. ‘This was the Thatcher years. In Liverpool in
the ’80s, she decimated us. All the manufacturing industry was closing down and it
was high unemployment – at times up to 20-25 per cent there – and we got all the
folk who had real difficulties.’
The role also provided her with her first encounter with problem drug use. ‘They
sent this laddie round to see me, he was about 22 and limping because he had an
abscess on the vein in his foot where he’d been injecting. That was the first time I’d
come into contact with anything like that.’ By chance, a friend was working with
consultant psychiatrist and harm reduction pioneer Dr John Marks, and arranged for
her to spend a week shadowing staff at his service. ‘I went to an outreach, family
conferences, scripting sessions. It was a whole new world,’ she says.
She took what she’d learned back to her role at a job centre in Walton, Liverpool,
where an ever-growing percentage of her clients were using heroin. ‘I just tried to
WORK
FAIR
Mhairi Doyle spent a quarter of
a century helping people with
substance problems into work.
She talks to
David Gilliver
about
austerity and the new benefits
landscape