Learning From the Experts, Part 1

Well, I’m back in the ‘office’ after my long overdue break. It was great to have a serious ‘time-out’ and also sit back and enjoy the Olympic Games. They were awesome and many performances stunning. What stood out most was the camaraderie between the athletes.

Anyway, here is today’s blog which focuses on a piece of research we conducted years ago, research of which I am particularly proud. Gemma Salter, who conducted the main analysis I describe, was one of my star undergraduate project students in the Department of Psychology, Swansea University. She had gained an outstanding First Class Honours Degree and won the prize for the best project of the year for an earlier piece of research she conducted on the impact of substance use problems on family members

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“You’re all going to hate the word ‘recovery’” by DJMac

Disagree-2One of the problems with an aspirational and non-prescriptive definition of recovery is that it is hard to measure. The definitions most commonly featured in the literature share some elements including wellbeing or health, abstinence and citizenship.

Clearly if you can’t define it precisely, then it’s hard to commission services to deliver on it. In this case proxy outcomes are used. There’s a lot of debate amongst professionals on recovery definitions and measurements, but what about service users? What do they make of ‘recovery’?

In a teasingly titled paper (‘‘You’re all going to hate the word ‘recovery’ by the end of this’’: Service users’ views of measuring addiction recovery) Joanne Neale and colleagues scope the views of clients and patients in a variety of settings and run past them professional perceptions on recovery measures. How different are the perspectives?

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