Meeting Nathan Pitman, founder of Nine Four, was a breath of fresh air. I had finally met someone who understood and loved web communities – and knew how to build the underlying structure that will allow our community to flourish. Nathan also worked closely with the guys at Spoken Image on the look and feel of the website. The design of our site and the underlying content management system has been a fantastic journey, one which you cannot appreciate unless you’ve been there. This will be a long and continuing journey and I look forward to many adventures with Nathan and his colleague Paul Cripps.

Breaking Free Online is an online treatment and recovery programme that allows people to resolve the psychological and lifestyle issues that are driving their use of alcohol and/or drugs. It can be used by people independently, allowing them to take control of their own recovery by developing practical life skills and tackling their difficulties in their own time and at their own pace. Or it can be used as a platform for delivering computer-assisted therapy, allowing peer mentors, volunteers, practitioners or family members to support people actively as they work through the programme, so maximising their experience of it.

The programme has been developed over two years by a team of clinical psychologists and others with frontline and commissioning experience of substance misuse services. It includes 20 evidence-based psychosocial interventions, and is now being utilised in a wide range of settings across the UK.

To use Breaking Free Online, people are given a code that provides them with 3 months of unlimited 24/7 access. At the end of this time, they can extend their usage or save all their work and resources into a comprehensive recovery toolkit which they can draw on whenever they need to. Access codes can be obtained from a range of service providers.

The team at Breaking Free Online are delighted to partner with Wired In because the online virtual recovery community complements and enhances the online psychological therapy offered by the programme. Our partnership helps make technology-enhanced recovery a meaningful and potent option for those wanting to embrace and sustain change in their life. Check out on YouTube.

Patient Opinion was founded in 2005 and since then has grown to be the UK’s independent non-profit feedback platform for health services. Patient Opinion is a website where health service users can share their experiences and opinions of using health services. Those experiences are sent to just the right staff, to help them use that feedback to understand how people really feel about services, and to improve areas of care, where needed. Patient Opinion is a conversation, a conversation between the patients, carers and the professionals of the health service bodies.

Jason Gough works for Patient Opinion, to bring this innovative new approach to service improvement to substance misuse services. Jason has an expert background in guiding and supporting service users to influence service change. Having spent the last 18 years gaining an intimate knowledge of addiction services, first as a service user and then helping to improve and influence those services, Jason’s broad past experience has given him a passion for empowering service users to impact on services.

Jason says, “Joining in partnership with Wired In feels like a very natural and exciting progression for Patient Opinion, with recovery now firmly on the agenda we have the opportunity to give an equal and public voice at every stage of the recovery journey. Recovery needs to be at the heart of treatment and the community, through partnerships we can strengthen the bridges and lower the barriers that exist between recovery groups. Capturing, listening and responding too the emerging narrative of the recovery with a local reference will be the important building block of any truly recovery oriented system.”

Spoken Image is a specialist creative communication design company based in Manchester, led by Geoff Allman. They designed our logo and brand identity, and a look and style that can be used for all Wired In resources. Mark Laycock developed an excellent CD-ROM teaser for us containing written and film material focusing on a variety of issues related to recovery from addiction, as well as to Wired In. It was so much fun working with Mark and Geoff on this, and we learnt a lot. We’ve also become good friends.

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