Effectiveness Bank bulletin 20 October 2014

Latest additions to the Effectiveness Bank start with major public health measures respectively to reduce ill health related to drug use and to drinking, then two reviews with the same message: services must invest in follow-up consultation, supervision or feedback to be confident that training counsellors and therapists will pay off for clients.

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WHO anti-HIV guidance advocates maintenance prescribing and needle exchange
Consolidated World Health Organization guidance on HIV prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care for key populations strongly advocates universal access to needle exchange for injectors, and for dependent opioid users, to indefinite, high-dose methadone and buprenorphine maintenance.
Also see these more detailed WHO guidelines specific to medication-based treatments for opioid dependence including methadone and buprenorphine maintenance.

Health benefits lost by reversal in English alcohol price policy
When for England the UK government reverted from a proposed minimum price per unit of alcohol to a ban on pricing below duty plus VAT, they abandoned a policy that would probably have had 40–50 times the impact on consumption and reaped correspondingly greater health gains.
Also see this hot topic entry on minimum price alcohol policies.

Post-workshop follow-up helps retain therapy training gains
Selecting key research and reviews for the treatment matrices revealed that this review from 2005 remains a unique and valuable resource. Rather than simply dispatching staff to one-off workshops, the implication is that services must invest much more in follow-up consultation, supervision or feedback to be confident training will pay off for clients.

Learning motivational interviewing: coach, don’t just train
The first review to amalgamate findings on training clinicians in motivational interviewing for substance use problems finds training does develop competence, especially when reinforced by supervision or coaching based on trainees’ actual performance. There may be no need for initial training to be face-to-face; books and videos can do as well.
Sent by Drug and Alcohol Findings Effectiveness Bank to alert you to site updates and UK-relevant evaluations of drug/alcohol interventions. Managed by DrugScope, Alcohol Concern, the National Addiction Centre and Alcohol Research UK. Supported by Alcohol Research UK, Society for the Study of Addiction, and J. Paul Getty Jr. Charitable Trust.