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Offer Intervention Services

Problem:

Family members and friends do not know how to motivate clients to enter treatment.

Solution:

Offer intervention services to help family members and friends get people into treatment.

Featured Stories

Gosnold, Inc. in Falmouth, Massachusetts created the Gosnold Reaching Out (GRO) program to offer intervention, coaching, education, and a support group for family members. As part of this program, they added a direct family program phone line with cell phone backup for staff to ensure that callers reach a live person. Only a small percentage of those calls result in actual interventions. Gosnold responds to 7-10 calls a week inquiring about intervention and other services. In one quarter, they reached approximately 100 family members through 20 interventions. Of the 20 interventions, 17 resulted in voluntary treatment, while the remaining 3 entered treatment through hospitalization for medical problems related to drugs or alcohol. Only 21 percent of potential interventions ended in treatment without the need for intervention. This program served 520 family members from 300 families in its first nine months by creating a variety of low cost or no cost services.

Family members generally take advantage of one or more of the family groups and services offered by GRO, including:

• Free 1.5 hour introduction to addiction problems
• 4 session educational session
• Drop-in family support group
• Recovery coaching

Gosnold will be adding multiple family groups in the second year of this project. Believing that family engagement could improve access to treatment, they invested in training staff as interventionists, using the ARISE model.

Lessons Learned

• Train staff as interventionists.
• Offer services to families.

Tracking Measures

Cycle Measure

Percentage of requests for intervention services that resulted in admission or participation in some other service provided by your agency.

Data Collection Form

None

ActionSteps

Plan

• 1. Plan what intervention services you will offer.
• 2. Collect baseline data for the next two weeks for:
  • Number of requests for intervention services
  • Number of requests for intervention services that result in admission or participation in some other service provided by your agency
  • Percentage of requests for intervention services that result in admission or participation in some other service provided by your agency

Do

• 3. Publicize this service on a small scale.
• 4. Test this change for the next two weeks.
• 5. Track and calculate the percentage of requests for intervention services that result in admission or participation in some other service provided by your agency.

Study

• 6. Check the fidelity of the change. Was the change implemented as planned?
• 7. Evaluate the change:
  • Did the number of requests for interventions increase?
  • Did the percentage of requests for intervention services that resulted in admission or participation in other services increase?
  • What feedback did you get about intervention services?
  • To what extent did offering intervention services result in admission without doing an intervention?

Act

• 8. If this change was an improvement:
  • Adopt this change or adapt it for more improvement and re-test.
  • Document the process.
  • Expand publicity about the service.
  • Test other, related promising practices that apply to your setting.

If this change was not an improvement and you can’t make it work, abandon this practice and test other promising practices that might be more successful in your setting.

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