One to One Intervention

Work Package lead: Dr Charlotte Lennox

We developed an intervention for use with 11-18 year olds who use drugs to help them reduce, stop, or learn more about their use. This can be delivered flexibly over the course of 6-12 weeks, depending on the young person’s individual needs. The intervention consists of seven stages:

– Introduction, Assessment & Engagement

– Formulation and developing skills to understand and manage drug use

– Developing goals

– Developing skills to manage craving

– Developing skills to reduce and manage drug use

– Personal risk factors and safety planning

– Evaluation

In Phase 1, the intervention was developed off the back of an in-depth search and review of the evidence as well as feedback from a range of key stakeholders. We consulted with service leaders, young people with lived experience, and parents to get their feedback about what a successful intervention would look like. As a result of this, we developed a manual that could then be tested.

In Phase 2, the intervention was rolled out over a period of 5 months in partnership with The Base, a young people’s drug and alcohol service provided by Change, Grow, Live Kirklees. Workers at The Base delivered the intervention to young people accessing their service who agreed to take part. In this stage, we wanted to see how the intervention, as contained in the manual, worked in practice. To evaluate this, we used a realist methodology. Central to this approach is the tenet of “what works, for whom, and in what context”. We chose this approach due to the complexity and diversity of young people who use substances as we were aware that a “one size fits all” approach would likely prove unsuccessful.

As part of the initial assessment process, young people were asked a number of questionnaires about their mood (WEMWBS), drug use (DAST), and emerging working relationship with their worker (WAI-SR). They also completed National Drug Treatment Monitoring Service (NDTMS) questions as part of the service’s statutory reporting duties. These were then recompleted at the end of the intervention in the Evaluation stage. In the case of the questionnaires, the goal of these was both to evaluate the intervention for research purposes, but also to provide a tool for young people to reflect upon the progress they had made through the course of the intervention. We wanted to see if the scores on these questionnaires would change to give us an indication if the intervention was working. We also wanted to see how this would work for young people

with different needs. To achieve this, we compared the different service groupings at The Base: Universal, Mental Health, Looked After, Exploitation, and Youth Justice.

In addition to these measures, we also wanted to know how the intervention was working. To do this, we conducted interviews with the staff delivering the intervention, as well as other staff involved in the delivery of the intervention (such as service managers) as well as with young people receiving the intervention. This enabled us to find out what both practitioners and clients felt was helpful (and what wasn’t) in the manual and why.

In the future, we hope to improve the manual further based on the feedback we have received from Phase 2 to make this more effective for more people. We also hope to expand the provision of this to see how it works in different settings, such as with older young people or in a different location.