RAFT’s first Birthday Party. A springtime for Recovery in Glasgow?

I know its hard to imagine RAFT is going to be one year old in ten weeks! “If we’re spared”, as my granny used to say. So with his finger planted, as ever, on the pulse of the recovery moment, Eamon (RAFT’s Chairperson) suggested we might like to celebrate. Oh my! Did we jump immediately to say Yes, Yes, Yes, let’s do it.

So we gathered tonight to throw ideas about and make commitments. We will be meeting weekly at RAFT until the event.

There will be plenty of time for unveiling some of the superb ideas we are having – think BIG Welcome, but all day, with all the best bits only of BIG Welcome and a bit more of what we know works and love doing and have learned to do better since then. Once we have a name for the event (next Friday), we will create its own blog account on Wired In to keep you updated.

The party will be the third in a series of recovery events bursting out Glasgow in the next three months.

South Sector Recovery Conversation cafe follow-up meeting happened on Monday 30th. Each of the Addiction Treatment teams in the South Sector made clear and unambiguous commitments to take recovery actions in their team.

• Capture aspirations, expectations and hopes for recovery right from the first contact with Community Addiction Team (CAT).
  This means the management team making sure that the paperwork doesn’t get in the way of establishing that dialogue.

• Challenge individual staff to live up to their full potential as workers, naming “stuckness” and not accommodating it.
  This means the management team being as pro-active about behaviour change in staff teams as they are about service user behaviour change.

• Remember the addiction work we are doing is about behaviour change in people.
  This means management supporting staff to sharpen up their intervention tools, perhaps providing and/or creating helpful, simple intervention tools.

• Lived Experience of Recovery/ Peer Support being available to CAT and in CAT clinics, shared care and new patient spaces.
  This means building a relationship with recovery volunteers who are now trained and available to work.

• Management team to model the use of recovery language in conversations with staff and among themselves.

• Create a working group to make clear the new model for titration clinic, so that it is the same across the whole sector.
  This means being open to change and willing to negotiate

Other actions:
SEA (South East Alternatives) to create a Recovery Volunteer placement bureau to allow easy access to trained and disclosed people who have lived experience of recovery.

In other developments across the fair city of Glasgow there are addiction treatment services combining to host recovery cafes in the North Western Sector this month and the North Eastern Sector will announce ( we hope) it’s recovery cafe date soon.

A small group is working on hosting a meeting for the first city-wide addiction treatment recovery group in the next few weeks. As ever we will keep you posted on how Glasgow’s very own springtime of recovery progresses.