Archived: Lifeline Stockton Alcohol Service

Updated 7 June 2016

The Lifeline Stockton Alcohol Service is commissioned by Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council to provide treatment and support for residents of the Stockton area with alcohol issues.

The service provides community-based psychosocial interventions (PSI), prescribing and recovery support interventions. Prescribing services are delivered through a sub-contracting arrangement with Fulcrum Medical Practice. Fulcrum employs two nurse prescribers, who are located with the Lifeline team at Skinner Street. Clinical interventions provided by the two nurses include clinically supported alcohol reductions, relapse prevention prescribing, community detoxification, hospital to home detox continuation, inpatient assessment and referral and clinical aftercare support.

Clients have access to a range of service-based and community-based psychosocial interventions, provided by Lifeline as part of a holistic package of care. Fulcrum staff were supported by a GP.

The service is registered to provide the following regulated activities:

• treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

Clients are supported through a combination of one-to-one and group work. A weekly programme of activities and structured group sessions are available for clients.

Group sessions include:

• art therapy
• music group
• alcohol awareness
• SMART recovery (Self-management and recovery training).

Regular ‘drop-in’ sessions are provided for clients, which require no booking or appointment.

The service is made up of a number of small teams based in different places:

• Alcohol Treatment Requirement (ATR) team. An ATR is a community sentence imposed by the court as an alternative to custody and requires the offender to engage in treatment to reduce alcohol-related offending.

• Team around the practice (TAP) team. These workers are based in GP practices in the area and support clients to reduce harmful drinking to prevent alcohol-related hospital admission.

• Drug and alcohol referral team (DART). This had two workers based in the local hospital. DART workers provide support to people who have been admitted to A&E due to alcohol-related issues. The aim is to reduce readmission to hospital.

• Children and young people team. This has two members of staff and a senior practitioner who work into a multidisciplinary service to support young people with substance misuse issues. These staff were based in the Youth Direction centre in Stockton.

The Care Quality Commission has not previously inspected the service.

Updated 7 June 2016

We do not currently rate substance misuse services.

We found the following areas of good practice :

• there were enough staff to meet the needs of clients
• staff had the necessary skills and had access to appropriate training
• procedures for safeguarding clients from abuse were robust and staff demonstrated a clear understanding of them
• staff reported incidents or harm or risk of harm and recorded them appropriately and the service had a good system to review and learn from incidents
• staff carried out comprehensive assessments of clients’ needs in a timely manner
• staff followed appropriate best practice guidelines
• the service worked effectively with a range of other organisations to provide an holistic approach to meet the needs of clients
• clients had opportunities to feed back about their care and be involved in decisions about the service.

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

• the fire doors in the first floor kitchen did not meet British standard requirements
• safeguarding alerts were not being recorded on the incident reporting system, in line with the provider’s policy
• ongoing assessment of risk to clients was not fully documented in recovery plans, some of which were not comprehensive and did not show evidence of the involvement of clients
• recovery capital was not being discussed with people who used the service to inform treatment planning
• clinical audits were not being undertaken
• staff had not received formal training on the Mental Capacity Act.