Recommendations for practitioners

1. Recommendations for
practitioners

2. Recommendations: facilitating
mutual aid
• There are many ways that specialist substance misuse and non-
specialist practitioners in health and social care roles can help
facilitate access to mutual aid.
• Of course, there is open access to many mutual aid groups anyway,
but people you meet with problem substance use may not know
about them, or even have wrong information or ideas about them.
•
• For instance, what did YOU think about Alcoholics Anonymous
before you started studying substance misuse?
• Unless you have been a member of your local group, you may have
similar pre-conceived ideas as the people who would benefit from
membership.

3. Recommendations: facilitating
mutual aid (cont.)
• Depending on your role in health or social care, recommendations
for facilitating access may differ.
• Whatever your role, you can go beyond giving contact details or
handing out leaflets!
• For those who work in community or substance misuse oriented
services:
– An active approach could be to host the local meeting, invite
members to see service users or include Recovery Champions
to volunteer with the service.
• Recovery Champions are people in later stages of recovery
who can role model recovery and advise people at early
stages.

4. Recommendations: facilitating
mutual aid (cont.)
(NTA 2013)
The NTA recommends essential steps to enable practitioners to
facilitate mutual aid:
1. Introduce the topic of mutual aid into sessions with service users
and promote attending meetings.
2. Help the service user to contact a current member of a mutual
aid group who can accompany him/her to a meeting.
3. Take an active interest in the service user’s attendance at,
engagement with and experience of mutual aid groups.
It also helps to establish contacts with the local groups, even visit an
open meeting. You will need to find out what mutual aid groups are in
your area, and who they are for (i.e. users, family members, specific
substance type).

5. Recommendations: facilitating
mutual aid (NTA 2013)
• Further contacts can develop between
your service and the mutual aid groups.
Why not arrange for a group member to
take someone to a meeting?
• Consider taking someone to a meeting
yourself.
• Make sure you know what the group is
about and what its philosophies are. This
can be done just by reading their
websites. It’s all there!

6. Recommendations: facilitating
mutual aid – service steps
(NTA 2013)
• The NTA recommends that services can adopt strategies to facilitate
mutual aid.
• This applies mostly to those services set up to have a more supportive
role (perhaps social services, community nurse teams, outreach teams,
etc).
– Provide space for 12-step and SMART Recovery meetings.
– Develop meetings that run while the service is open, allowing
opportunistic attendance .
– Give users access to literature on 12-step and SMART Recovery
mutual aid groups.
– Have lists of local meetings available and ensure they are regularly
updated.
– Provide printed directions and maps to these meetings.

7. Recommendations: facilitating
mutual aid – service steps (cont.)
(NTA 2013)
• Ask service users for recommendations .
• Provide fares or incentives.
• Text or ring users to remind them to attend.
• Escort service users to groups.
• Ask all service users about any current or past attendance at self-help
groups.
• Consider discussing mutual aid – treatment induction, care-plan
review, transition planning at the end of treatment.
• Add a section about facilitating access to mutual aid to care pathway
documentation.

8. Recommendations: discussing
mutual aid
(NTA 2015)
• Negotiate a shared session to
discuss mutual aid.
• Raise the topic in a manner
sensitive to the service user’s
knowledge and experience.
• Identify any concerns the user
may have and address these
where possible.
• Discuss any previous
experience of mutual aid, talk
about good and bad
experiences.
• Encourage them to make up
their own mind about what will
work, but also encourage them
to commit and ‘give it a go.’
• Summarise and close the
discussion with clearly
specified commitments
(service user and practitioner).

9. Recommendations: facilitating
mutual aid (cont.)
(NTA 2015)
• Remember it is ok to continue to discuss their attendance. Although
it may be ‘anonymous’ or confidential, you can ask how they are
doing and monitor it in a way that is appropriate to your care work,
shows your interest and helps the person discuss any doubts or
difficulties. Indeed, it also helps to review successes and
enthusiasms too!
• Remember, once your service user is attending, it doesn’t mean you
need to back off.

10. References
National Treatment Agency (2013) Helping clients to access and engage with mutual aid.
Available at:
http://www.nta.nhs.uk/uploads/rr_facilitatingmutualaid_jan2013%5B0%5D.pdf