An evaluation of the Changing Lives project

Charlie Lloyd and Tom Parkman have successfully won a £53K grant from the City of York Council to evaluate the Changing Lives addictions and recovery project in York. This project is a twelve-step, day-treatment programme targeted at people with serious drug and alcohol addiction which has been operating in the York area for two years. The programme is intensive, requiring participants to attend every day, Monday to Friday, 9am to 4pm, for a period of twelve weeks. In conjunction with their participation in the programme, service users are also required to attend an additional three self-help groups per week, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. This intensive approach to recovery has shown promise elsewhere and the University of York, Department of Health Sciences, evaluation offers a great opportunity to look at how such models impact on people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction.

The evaluation aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the community rehabilitation approaches adopted in the Changing Lives programme. The evaluation will explore what impact the project has had on recovery, including substance use, and what impact it has had on offending rates. New users of the project will be assessed using a variety of methods as they enter the programme, and then again, three and six months later. To gain an understanding of why people fail to complete the twelve-week plan, people who drop out of the programme will be asked for the reasons why they left.

The evaluation will run for fifteen months, during which time participants will be asked about their experiences of the project via interviews and questionnaires. In addition to a report being presented to the City of York Council, the findings of the evaluation will be published in peer reviewed journals.

Funders
Members

Funders

Funders:	The Council of the City of York
Start date:	1 April 2014
End date:	30 June 2015

Members

Internal members

Charlie Lloyd
Tom Parkman