Rehab revolution anyone?

[simon]

http://www.addictiontoday.org/addictiontoday/2011/06/rehab-revolution-concordat-update.html

[simon]

 
 


Addiction Today's September
News Flash


 

Today's stories...

  ESTABLISHMENT OF A ‘WATCHDOG’ FUNCTION FOR DRUG AND ALCOHOL TREATMENT COMMISSIONING
  INVITATION TO LAUNCH IN HOUSE OF COMMONS



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ESTABLISHMENT OF A ‘WATCHDOG’ FUNCTION FOR DRUG AND ALCOHOL TREATMENT COMMISSIONING

 

The coalition government has articulated a clear policy for the reform of the drug- and alcohol-treatment sector to make it less bureaucratic, and more focused on producing outcomes in terms of individuals’ recovery from addiction. There are real concerns about the extent to which this policy will be reflected in commissioning decisions of local budget holders. Primary Care Trusts and Local Authorities, through local commissioning partnerships, are now charged with reviewing the expenditure of over £1billion of public money, and ensuring that they remove waste, and introduce more opportunities for real recovery, into their local treatment systems.

In the absence of any government scrutiny mechanism, or disciplinary/whistleblower infrastructure, the Concordat proposes to establish an informal mechanism for assessing commissioners’ progress in this task, and for challenging examples of poor practice.

This will be a two-level approach in that the Concordat will first use all due diligence to establish good practice through effective communications with Commissioners, through a two-way process whereby we communicate to Commissioners what our expectations are around the use of Inpatient and Residential treatment and the benefits in terms of outcomes that its use offers them. At the same time, it will provide a channel through which purchasers can address their concerns about specific Concordat providers or Inpatient and Residential provision in general. Public feedback/whistle blowing and legal challenges will be used only where this first stage fails.




INVITATION TO LAUNCH IN HOUSE OF COMMONS


14 SEPTEMBER 2011

Amber Rudd MP is kindly hosting the Concordat Watchdog launch.
The Rt Hon Lord Mancroft and Deirdre Boyd will reveal details.

Please email Deirdre@addictiontoday.org if you would like an invitation.

Email Laura@addictiontoday.org for more information.





 

[Jimmy]

They appear to be shocked that NICE rejected an appeal to review its guidelines.

One can only assume that NICE doesn't want blood on its hands. When the National Institute of Clinical Excellence tells you that you are wrong, the best option surely is to shut the f***k up - I mean, how much more evidence to these people need?

[usandthem]

Wow...NICE are really taking this to the next level..Beauracracy and tied hands. I do hope that the service user can get a voice at this level. Fingers Xd but cameron would have us all whipped with the cat of nine tails if it is his final decision.

[derek d j]

'Addiction Today' - the voice of the rehab industry. Tickles me to read how they bravely deliver their costly 'rehabilitations' in the face of all this government apathy and the fiends from NICE and the NTA with their tiresome demands for evidence. As they say, they've a 'proven track record' and have produced thirty thousand permanently detoxified champions. A purple pig just flew past my window.

I can 'get 'em clean' in my basement and am quite happy to have my results independently audited. Let's make it in about ten years, any less than that isn't recovery. But give me the bread now, ok? It's the least I deserve for my goodness and kickbacks to 'Addiction Today'.

[Jimmy]

They seem so sure that residential rehab is what the majority of service users want, but find impossible to access. When I entered rehab for the first (and only) time, some of my fellow residents were on there second, third, fourth, even fifth or sixth attempts. Funny that.

The rehab sectors incessant attack on maintenance treatment is a money making scam based on the promotion of false hope and smeared in bullshit. After all, if they cared for service users one iota, attempting to sabotage their scripts would be not be anywhere near their agenda, let alone on it.

Frankly, it stinks.

[usandthem]

@ dereck d.j  What do they have install for us next I fear?!! I think the government would be happy if we all just died. I guess that the economic crisis has put the service user on the frontline for having our methadones slashed. If the user isnt going to agree to reduction and functions better being static..Then whats the point of the urgency to get them to come down off their methadone because the dsp or key-worker thinks it best??, or better still when the dsp gets cash incentives for getting the user to reduce off their methadone, when it will never work unless the user is fully committed and wants to reduce themselves. That is just pressurising and pushing stable users back into using drugs and ultimately crime. Its counter - productive. All so they can look good at the next ballot box???!!!

[derek d j]

Can't answer right now. I've got that Cathy Gygnell in my basement and her verbal diarrhoea is giving her grief again. And a 17 year old who kicked wants to know why he hasn't a column in 'Addiction Today'. For £4K a week, I ask myself, is it worth it?

Better stiffen the sinews and remember I'm a rehab revolutionary. The cause, the cause, always the cause.

[usandthem]

Haha No worries dereck..Its just another tentative rant I have about the system!! I forgot it was misplaced and ended up in the wrong topic. Im a newb. Hopefully will get used to the forum.

[sapphire]

Maybe we should "detox" a few of the Weird In crew in your basement Derek! Might be fun.

I really don't know why they say that people can't access residential rehab either Jimmy, I have lied in North South and Mid and had no problems accessing it if I wanted it, nor did my contempories, who as you say are on their 4th, 5th go.

You'd think after trying it 5 or so times you'd realise it ain't gonna work being abstinent and stay on a script?

[derek d j]

I've been trying to read between the lines of this mystifying document as part of a continuing, macabre fascination with the strange ways of UK Drug Treatment. 'Whistleblowers'? Makes it sound like treatment is run by a bunch of shifties.

The proposed 'payment by results' is even worse. A bunch of blunderers and snake-oil salesmen have wandered in on the coat tails of the new government and attempt to bewitch us and them all by ramming this nonsense down user throats. Private companies operate for the money. When that is earned by the percentage of customers who discharge treatment or stop injecting, but not of users leading laudatory lives, it's an obvious invitation to abuse.

Is abstinence now to be considered more important than a worthwhile existence? How can addiction realities be so blatantly denied and replaced by this sort of pie-in-the-sky, 'they only need to be told' balderdash? Is sub-Tory ideology and cynical profiteering to be passed off for policy? It's wisful and it's arrogant; do they assume drug users to be morons who need their days structured and their thinking done for them?

Have the pilots actually commenced yet? Somebody needs to intervene now before these misguided schemers inflict any more damage.

[OP8S]

I think it's a widely held assumption by non-drug users or legalised drug users that we are morons, & that we do need our thinking done for us. After all, who would be so stupid as to break laws enforced upon us by the state!
 Even if it is only to use a naturally occuring substance which at the least gives them pleasure, or for a lot more provides them with some relief inflicted on our sensitive minds by this dissapointing & intolerant civilisation.
Only a minority go out intent on breaking laws just for the pleasure of doing so & should rightly be made to face the consequences. Many more are forced into breaking the law, if only to achieve the control of their own conciousnes.
This " payment by results " is putting an extremely vulnerable proportion of people into the hands of the private sector, whether they claim to be charitable or not. Basically throwing us to the lions.
Businessmen are businessmen after all, & for their organisations to prosper then they must maximize profits. How they do that is written there in black & white & the potential for abuse of the system is extremely high as addicts are well known not to make too much noise about the way they're being treated.
For their business's to grow, people will be pushed of scripts & the illicit trade will flourish.
It's enough to send a shiver down the spine & I hope that it will not play out in that manner. But it's basic free-market economics surely.
Somebody please post back & re-assure all the Alliance posters that this will not be the case, but I'm sure even the most optimistic of the schemes supporters can't be that sure.

[usandthem]

"Human farming" Dereck. The new world of the Tory controlled DSP. ("Fix them or Destroy them")

[usandthem]

OP8S When the key-workers send the user home feeling bad and guilty for not wanting to enter into their dsp self profiteering probation run methadone reduction plan. I think we know the NHS mental health department has took a turn for the worst!!

The M-Alliance is our voice

[derek d j]

Yes, and in the name of sense should howl.

We deserve a better understanding of addiction realities and the psychology of addict/non-addict interface. It's hardly asking freedom for Tooting.