Archived: Drug and Alcohol Wellbeing Service (DAWS)

We do not currently rate independent standalone substance misuse services.

We found the following areas of good practice:

Staff undertook comprehensive assessments of client’s health needs and personal circumstances before providing them with support. This included detailed risk assessments concerning each client and staff updated these when the risks affecting each client changed.

The service provided a diverse range of support for clients, including high quality psycho-social interventions, and supported clients to be closely involved in their care, treatment and rehabilitation. An important part the service was a peer mentor programme to help motivate and encourage clients to engage with the service and complete their treatment programmes.

Staff discussed clients’ treatment options with them and provided detailed information to ensure clients could make informed decisions about the help they wanted to receive. Clients’ care plans were detailed, client-led and addressed their needs. These plans also included the steps staff would tale to support clients to re-engage with the service where they had an unplanned break from it.

The service liaised and worked closely with other health services, including clients’ GP services to meet clients’ needs. The service also had developed effective links with other external agencies, including local hostels, to help reach out to those in the community who most needed their help. In addition, the service had adapted its clinic times to enable clients with working and family commitments to attend.

Staff stored medicines securely and there were robust systems in place for the management of prescriptions. Medicines were administered safely by trained staff and staff appropriately tested clients to ensure they were adhering to their treatment programme. Staff regularly reviewed clients’ treatments to determine whether any changes were required and appropriately clients’ health while they engaged with the service.

Clients spoke very positively about the support they received from staff and the interactions we observed between them demonstrated that staff were caring, respectful, supportive, as well as highly motivated.

The management of the service worked effectively to ensure that the new organisation worked to meet its targets and set a range of appropriate objectives to develop various aspects of the service. Senior managers also demonstrated leadership in responding to concerns raised by inspectors by immediately completing action plans to appropriately address them.

However, we also found areas that the service provider could improve:

The environment in each of the three sites where the service was located was not always safe. At all sites staff kept medicines in rooms where the temperatures were too high, which risked making them unfit for use. Medicines were also not always stored in a tidy and ordered way and the content of some first aid boxes was out of date. Where fire safety assessments had identified problems staff had not always completed action plans to fix these issues by the due date.

At each of three sites there was uncertainty and inconsistency regarding emergency equipment and supplies that were stored there. Not all sites had the same equipment and medicines and not all staff understood whether any of these emergency resources should be used or not. Senior managers said that the provider’s policy was to dial 999 in emergencies, but it was therefore not clear why those emergency supplies were still available.

Some staff lacked necessary training and knowledge. The immediate life support training for one doctor was out of date. Also, many staff demonstrated that they did not understand the main principles of the Mental Capacity Act, which was an important part of the knowledge required for their work.