Lifelong learning
Keeping up to date with best practice is part of the professional life of a team or an individual. Most people combine reading journal articles, attending case reviews and conferences, and discussions with colleagues to know about current best practice.
Continuing Professional Development, CPD, is an essential part of good practice, but also a state of mind. The good thing about CPD is that it is enjoyable and rewarding to learn new things and put them into practice. Whether digesting academic papers or refreshing some basics, practitioners should be adding to their knowledge every single week. From time to time take on something major - perhaps with support from a training course or tutorials.
Supervision is a key element of good practice for all levels of staff. Supervision may be individual, in which case it is important that a supervisor is competent and trusted, or as a peer group. Therapy sessions need to be recorded for supervision and process assessments.
Use the Working Alliance Inventory and the Brief Process Rating Scale for therapist effectiveness appraisals.
Aspects of Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
Make sure to set aside regular time for CPD. It can be more fun and more productive to do it with colleagues...
✔︎ Video recording of treatment sessions is the gold standard for evaluating individual practice. Much can be learned simply by watching yourself in session. Better to have objective views in a peer group or with a competent and trusted supervisor.
✔︎ Audit is a valuable tool. Projects may be at a national level, for example monitoring deaths, or at a local level, for example checking on the quality of a procedure such as urine screening or detoxification.
✔︎ Journal articles are the way to keep up with the latest scientific evidence in the field. May work best as a journal club or access a website.
✔︎ Guidelines are a helpful benchmark of good practice. They are not a rule book, they get out of date quickly and need to be interpreted for local use.
Learning modules
The CPD modules involve a substantial amount of study and participants will need to set aside sufficient time fully to digest and reflect on their work. Eight weeks is a good average. Make sure that you record your own reflections and observations and save them for your CPD portfolio.
Talking to People Knowing how to interact with people is possibly the most important skill for anybody in any work environment. It applies to all levels of staff. It really is not that difficult but does need self-awareness and some humility in order to be the effective communicator that practitioners wish to be. This is why we are talking about talking to people.
The module addresses the basic skills that have been found to be important in engaging people with addiction problems, maintaining that engagement and helping them move towards recovery and, therefore, improvements in health and social functioning.
Psycho-pharmacology This module looks at how medicines and illicit drugs work and why they can be addictive. Connecting the pharmacology with the psychology of addiction is an essential skill for anyone helping people to recover from their addiction - it also makes addictive behaviours a fascinating field to study.
You cannot prescribe your way out of an addiction problem but medications can be helpful along the recovery journey. This module covers the knowledge base required for prescribers and for any practitioner who is interested in why people use drugs in the ways that they do.
Psycho-social Interventions This module assumes you have completed the Talking to People module. You will find an elaboration of the skills you learned there in each of the topics. The orientation is one of dealing with the here and now and the future, and getting on with the task of helping people change. As always you will be introduced to the available evidence to support your learning.
For most addiction problems, including mild and moderate mental health issues, the research evidence points to treatment having a focus on making lifestyle changes and getting support from family and friends. This is why we adopt a behavioural therapy approach.
Mental Health & Addiction This module examines the basic knowledge required for understanding the co-morbidity of substance use and mental health. It aims to equip people with an understanding of mental health disorders commonly associated with substance misuse, the nature of co-occurrence, commonly co-occurring psychological disorders and what the average comorbidity worker might do with it all.
Mental health problems are common in people with substance use disorders. It follows that people without specialist knowledge are likely to encounter these challenges. The module addresses the needs of staff at different levels of expertise and with different treatment roles.
A new module Measuring Treatment Outcomes will be available in 2025.
About the modules
Each module will take you on your learning journey: you will visit a number of website pages and also find some material designed to be controversial or thought provoking, which is not in the website.
Each module is made up of four topics. Each topic has a set of tasks. One of the tasks will be to Explore the Resources related to the topic, where you will watch videos, read scientific articles, and take in checklists, for example. The next task is the Debating Forum, which will present a controversial or thought provoking idea, which will be complemented by a research paper or report. The final task for each topic will be a discussion of the learning points - ideally you will convene or join a Study Group (this could be a peer group, just one colleague, or a trusted supervisor) for your topic discussions. Arrange your meeting times at the start of each topic and use these as the deadline for completion. The aim of the Study Group is to sharpen up your thoughts on each topic.
Be sure to record your reflections on what you have learned and save them as a record of your CPD learning. There are opportunities to record reflections after each task.
