Healthcare professionals and partners
Skills and workforce
Substance Misuse Skills Consortium
"Sharing Skills, Building Recovery"
Everyone involved in drug and alcohol treatment wants to help users overcome addiction and achieve safe sustained recovery and reintegration into their communities. This is an important new initiative to harness the extensive knowledge in the sector to create a highly skilled and ambitious workforce to enable drug and alcohol users to succeed in treatment.
William Butler, Skills Consortium chair
This is a home-grown initiative by employers and provider organisations to improve the skills and clinical practice of the drug and alcohol treatment workforce, and the NTA is helping to enable it become a self-sufficient operation.
Paul Hayes, NTA chief executive
The Skills Consortium website looks fantastic. I look forward to using it myself and would encourage other practitioners to try this valuable resource.
Zoe Gatland, Senior keyworker, Lifeline, Blackburn
The Substance Misuse Skills Consortium is an independent, sector-led initiative to harness the ideas, energy and talent within the substance misuse treatment field, to maximise the ability of the workforce, and to help more drug and alcohol misusers recover.
The consortium will help the substance misuse treatment sector to:
- Identify what the treatment workforce needs to promote and sustain better outcomes for service users, their families and communities
- Review and develop initiatives to attract and retain the workforce
- Equip practitioners and managers with the relevant skills
Consortium members include providers, service users and carers, and professional and membership organisations for those working in substance misuse treatment. If you would like to join the consortium, you can find out more here.
The Skills Consortium’s Skills Hub provides access to a vast library of resources on substance misuse treatment interventions.
The Skills Consortium national conference June 2011
The first national Skills Consortium conference, ‘An inspirational recovery-orientated drug and alcohol workforce: how to deliver the drug strategy commitments' took place on Monday 6 June 2011.
'What can we learn from each other?' was the question William Butler, chair of the Substance Misuse Skills Consortium, asked at the start of conference. The answer gradually revealed itself during the following hours, as a series of treatment providers from around the country gave presentations that described and explained how they were getting to grips with the recovery and workforce agenda set out in the new drug strategy.
The conference briefing and presentations are now available to download.