Sustained Recovery Management

"The recognition of drug dependence as a multi-factorial health disorder, which often follows the course of a relapsing and remitting chronic disease, has spurred calls to shift the focus of drug dependence treatment from acute care to an approach of sustained recovery management in the community. Sustained recovery management applies many of the central components of recovery capital and the Sustainable Livelihoods framework. Service wise, a sustained recovery management approach offers the following:

"• Uses a strengths-based approach, considering the resources available in the clients life;
"• Takes into account the main areas of life/the eight domains of recovery capital (and their potentially compounding interrelationships) that can support rehabilitation and social reintegration for drug dependent persons;
"• Integrates a broader range of drug dependence rehabilitation and social reintegration support services, to strengthen human, vocational, and social capital necessary for a healthy, stable and meaningful life.
"• Uses broad, family- and community-focused, strengths-based, continual assessment processes;
"• Implements early and assertive engagement by service professionals;
"• Develops client- and family-generated recovery plans;
"• Includes assertive management of co-occurring disorders and challenges to recovery;
"• Uses peer-based models of recovery support and community resource development and mobilization;
"• Shifts the centre of service activity from the institutional environment to the client/family’s natural environment in the community;
"• Puts emphasis on sustained monitoring, recovery coaching, assertive development and linkages to the community services for recovery support and, as needed, early re-intervention;
"• Focuses on long-term evaluation of the effects of service combinations and sequences.
"• Establishes a sustainable health care partnership between service providers and clients;
"• Aims at easy access to services by shifting their location from remote institutions to the client/family’s natural environment in the community;
"• Emphasizes the importance of policy change and advocacy to reduce social stigma attached to drug dependence, and to promote recovery supportive policies and programmes (White, Boyle, and Loveland, 2002);

"Building social capital is a visible, central element of sustained recovery management. It encompasses four of the eight domains of recovery capital in Figure III above, namely, family and social supports; peer-based support; community integration and cultural renewal; and healthy environments."