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resources corner
at your
fingertips
Looking for the ultimate resource for research
led George Allan to Findings
Time to reflect
I came here with an attitude, all gangster and image,
I knew I had to change my life and surely I could manage.
I said I’ll go Addaction, bare my soul, but not much truth…
lip service, lie, play the system – and some crap about my youth.
I’ll never tell ’em ’bout my struggles and the time I feel real pain,
Just stay under the radar, then hit the streets again.
Ha. They would never find out, I’ll keep my cards close to my chest…
…Cause I’m a liar, it’s my trade, at being selfish – I’m the best.
After a while though things got hard, that was never in my plan…
‘Grow up’ they said ‘you’re still a child’… I thought I was a man,
Cause I’ve got kids, I’ve a wife – and I’m way past twenty one,
I guess it’s time to quit the bullshit… work has just begun.
So, now it’s time to analyse my life,
The pain I caused so many and the stress I gave my wife.
Oblivious to where my life was heading,
The drugs and the crime and the women,
The court case I was dreading.
Didn’t turn up ‘you know’… I hid in the attic,
With the feds at my door and the dog barking erratic.
My partner knew ‘to get arrested’ was the only way,
But she was loyal, when they asked her where I was, she wouldn’t say.
Police are in my kid’s room, woken from their beds,
My babies crying ‘where’s my dad?’ what could be going through their heads?
This is embarrassing, it’s wrong… I don’t do myself no favours,
How does my girlfriend feel when she sees them nosey neighbours.
Man I gotta change, and form a plan of action
Maybe I could get some help from those workers in Addaction.
Addaction peer mentor/orderly
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HANDS UP – how many of you read original research articles? Thought so! But
if we are serious about basing practice and service delivery on evidence,
however ambiguous and contradictory this can be, we need to know what
research is telling us. Help is at hand, however: the problems of time
constraints, accessing original sources and interpreting complex material are
solved with Drug and Alcohol Findings.
Starting as a magazine, the venture became a free, web-based service a
decade ago (www.findings.org.uk). Mining the largest live drug and alcohol
library in the UK, Mike Ashton and associates have developed the project to
include more than 1,200 documents, including:
• Analyses: succinct summaries of numerous
original research papers, with commentaries
on their results.
• Hot Topics: explorations of controversial themes.
• Review Analyses: summaries of reviews or
syntheses of research findings.
• Abstracts: outlines of research which Findings
has yet to analyse.
‘In a field often
dogged by
believers who
are prepared
to fight their
corners...
Findings brings
a refreshingly
different
approach.’
What is exceptional about the Analyses and Hot
Topics is the sceptical eye which is brought to the
material. In a field often dogged by believers who
are prepared to fight their corners even when
confronted with overwhelming evidence to the
contrary, Findings brings a refreshingly different
approach. In the commentaries, Mike and his
associates are like dogs with bones, gnawing at the material from numerous
angles in order to tease out what is important for practitioners, service
managers and commissioners. If this sounds daunting, it isn’t – the research is
summarised in plain English and the critiques are equally accessible.
The site’s search facility is subject-based for ease of navigation, but to
provide ready access to essential documents relevant to particular themes, the
Matrices have been developed. These are grids, one for alcohol and one for
drugs, containing 25 squares. Down the side of these grids are five ‘intervention
types’ (screening and brief intervention; generic and cross-cutting issues;
medical treatment; psychosocial interventions; safeguarding the community),
while across the top are five ‘intervention levels’ (interventions; practitioners;
management/supervision; organisational functioning; treatment systems).
Click on the box at the intersection of your interest and there you’ll find the key
documents, along with a ‘Matrix Bite’ describing and summarising the issues.
Being on their mailing list guarantees receiving summaries of the latest
research and its implications; if you only want to subscribe to one such list,
Findings is the one.
George Allan is chair of Scottish Drugs Forum and author of Working with
Substance Users: a Guide to Effective Interventions (2014; Palgrave)
April 2017 | drinkanddrugsnews | 9