Mosaic Mural - Day 3

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Mosaic Mural Under Construction

All of us here at BCI are excited to watch our new mosaic mural going up in the entrance hall at the Lancaster Center. The mural is a tree symbolizing how addiction, through treatment, grows into recovery. In keeping with this theme, the words written on the tiles transition from negative at the bottom to positive at the top. The artist is generously volunteering her time to create this unique piece.

Here are some photos of the work in progress!

Drug Dealing Prevention Group

Are you involved with drug dealing or street addiction and want to change your lifestyle for the better? BCI has started a Drug Dealing Prevention Group.

The group takes place Tuesdays from 3:30 to 4:30 PM at the Alpha Center at 2814 West 2nd Street. Participants will learn strategies for making a prosocial life change. You must be a BCI Alpha client to attend.

This is the first group of its kind at BCI and one of the most-requested group topics by our clients.

For more information, please call 472-0381.

Confound It! Outside Forces Interfere with Incentives Experiment

The question: Will clients stay longer in addiction treatment if we reward them for attendance? The answer: Well, we don’t know. And I’m not being smart, that is an actual scientific explanation. Let me explain.

Our attendance is still below normal since we changed how we give incentives. We could say the new incentives caused attendance to drop – if that was the only thing that changed. But it wasn’t. Over the same time period, record-high numbers of people came in for an intake, and our census increased by 50. On top of that, two counselors and one supervisor were out for several weeks. (One was stuck on the other side of the world – trust me, you don’t want to know.) There were fewer staff to see more clients. If you were a client, which change would be more noticeable to you?

In scientific terms, we manipulated an independent variable (new incentives vs. old incentives) and measured the effect on a dependent variable (retention). Ideally, we would hold all other conditions constant. But our experiment was in a real treatment program, not a laboratory. And wouldn’t you know it, you can’t control external forces in the real world. A condition that offers an alternative and plausible explanation for the results of an experiment is called a confounding variable.

Census and staffing acted as confounding variables in our experiment. This means we can’t call the incentives a success or failure yet. But now things have stabilized and we will keep going. So bear with us, we may get a real answer to our question soon.

Some new developments to report:

• Our new marketing slogan is in place: Participation = Celebration!
• We’ll be adding prize drawings in groups because the more frequent the reward, the better at reinforcing attendance. Until now, clients got credit for group attendance but had to wait until their next individual session to get their reward.
• Counselors held a focus group to share challenges they had in implementing the program and solutions they had found. Since prize drawings took valuable minutes away from sessions, we moved the prize cabinet closer to counselors’ offices. We also learned that counselors are accustomed to using incentives to reward accomplishments and meet individual needs, so it is a real change to reward participation. A refresher training is planned, and we’ve invited an incentives expert to meet with the staff.

Participation = Celebration!

Our new slogan at the BCI Alpha Drug Free Program. Thanks to Intake Counselor Marc Weisburg for the idea.

Vote For Our Motivational Incentives Slogan

As many of you know, BCI Alpha has been offering motivational incentives to encourage more people to stay in drug and alcohol treatment for at least three months. It remains a challenge – more on that in an upcoming post. We continue to believe this can work and we want to do whatever we can to make it a success.

We’ve decided we need a marketing slogan. If we want to convince people to stay longer in treatment, we need to change their mindset. We need to “sell” our customers on the benefits of sticking with treatment once they’re here. We want to drive home the point that the first few months can be the most difficult, and BCI offers these prizes to help people through this period.

So we want a memorable catch phrase that will generate word of mouth. Something that clients can be reminded of every time they walk in our door, but also remember when they’re not here, and contemplating whether to show up for their appointment.

Help us choose a great slogan by voting for your favorite below, and also post your own ideas. We’ll announce our choice July 18. Thanks!

		What is the best slogan?
	The more you come in, the more you win.
	Beginners are winners.
	Recovery: Keep your eyes on the prize.
	Recovery is the jumbo prize. Start small. Keep coming back.
	Spend an hour in treatment, win a prize. Spend enough hours, win your recovery.
	Come for the prizes. Stay for recovery.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Join Team NSAFE for the 2007 AIDS Walk

The BCI NSAFE Program is once again putting together a team for the Delaware AIDS Walk on September 30. They need our help to recruit walkers and raise money to support HIV/AIDS services in Delaware.

NSAFE provides Ryan White and AIDS Waiver case management for individuals with HIV/AIDS. The program will get back 40% of all donations they collect. Each year they use the money they earn to provide a Thanksgiving meal for the BCI clients -- turkeys, food bags, veggies, beverages, etc.

Anyone interested in walking with Team NSAFE, please contact Denise Kitson at (302) 656-2348, ext. 131. If you don't want to walk, you can go to Team NSAFE's Page and make an online donation anytime. No amount is too small, and every penny counts.

Let's help our team reach their goal. Thank you!

Consumer Scholarships for Summer Institute

The State of Delaware has announced the availability of client scholarships to attend classes at the 36th Summer Institute, “Embracing Change: Promoting Recovery,” July 23-27, 2007.

Consumers may ask their counselor to call in their information, or they may send in their registration with a request for a scholarship to:

Penny Chelucci, Consumer Affairs Office Director, DHSS/DSAMH, 1901 N. DuPont Highway, Main Building, Room 197, New Castle, DE 19720.

The only scholarship requirement is that the person is a consumer of mental health or addiction services and lives in Delaware.

Consumers may register for any sessions they choose. There are some sessions that are specifically designed to be of interest to consumers. They are:

# 1072 Recovery, Trauma, and Empowerment on Wednesday
# 1083 Self-Advocacy and Negotiation on Thursday
# 1068 Empowerment and Consumer Culture on Friday
# 1052 Hiring, Supervising, and, If Necessary, Firing Service Providers in Recovery on Friday

DSAMH welcomes any and all consumers and is pleased to be able to assist their participation. Lunch is included in the scholarship. For consumers who live in Sussex County, the scholarship can also include lodging. Anyone who requires some form of accommodation to attend, please mention this with your request.

I Wish We Could Ride Around Wilmington And Play That Story

Here’s one last audio clip from our needle exchange celebration, and it’s a good one.

The speaker’s cell phone rang just as he came to the podium. He answered it. “Yeah, I’m speaking at the needle exchange. No, I’m not using needles no more, I’m just speaking about it. I love ya!” (Hangs up.) “Grandmas are something!”

Fred is a former injection drug user. All joking aside, he came to deliver an important message. Years ago, he used to share needles. He described the desperation of a heroin addict, how when the craving would strike, it didn’t matter where the syringe came from, and how easily he could disregard his own safety.

“You ended up sharing needles with people, people that were infected. And at the time, nobody didn’t know they had nothing, until they got real sick, and everybody was lying about their situation.”

“That’s what the drug does to a person.”

Thankfully, Fred found a way out of his addictive habit. And that was only the beginning. He turned his life around. He gave up not just drugs, but cigarettes, and cursing, and became a deeply spiritual person. Today he works as part of a local HIV/AIDS outreach team.

Fred’s transformation amazes people he knew in his addiction. “It’s something that feels so good, when a person’s been knowing you for so long, and they come up to you and say, ‘Is that you? Is that you that looks so good?’”

Delaware’s needle exchange program will give today’s drug users the chance to do what Fred has done. It may mean the difference between leaving this world before their time, or living to fulfill their own potential. Fred understands this.

“I know that the day that I die, and you all come and look over me, I’m gonna have a beautiful smile on my face.”

Our thanks go out to Fred for sharing this powerful story. Our MC David Isaac said what we were all thinking. “I wish we could ride around Wilmington and play that story.” Well, here’s a start.

Motivational Incentives Update: We Hit Some Barriers On the Road To Change

Two months ago, it looked like all was going well with our motivational incentives project. Given the chance to win prizes for attending their sessions, more clients were staying longer in treatment. It’s now been about four months and 200 people admitted since we began. The results? Retention is either unchanged, or as much as 10% lower.

Yes, you heard me right – this change we made isn’t working. What should we do? Scrap the new process and go back to our old way of doing things? Or do we press on and trust the research that says motivational incentives improve treatment outcomes? The stakes are high; real people with real drug and alcohol addictions are depending on us.

This is precisely why at BCI, we follow the NIATx model of organizational change: Plan, Do, Study, Act. With major change, some barriers are to be expected. Before we jump to any conclusions, we should question why we got the results we did.

Let’s look at the barriers we faced. First, our client volume was up during the last two months, with admissions and discharges both about 25% higher than normal. At the same time, our staff was down by two counselors, leaving us with six instead of eight. Not only were more clients coming in and out, but counselors had to deal with higher caseloads. Bad timing, but this is the real world, and these things happen.

But that isn’t all. The incentives procedure we had carefully planned out and trained our staff in wasn’t exactly going as planned. Sometimes, clients had to wait to get their prize because the counselor ran out of time. Counselors were faced with altering their preferred way of running a session. At least one counselor admitted he discouraged his clients from drawing for prizes because it was against his own philosophy of treatment.

Should we be surprised that the staff was not totally on board with the incentives? NIATx says no. Change is difficult. If we really want our project to succeed, we should acknowledge internal resistance and try to overcome it. We’re already looking at how to do this.

We’re also faced with other difficult questions. What caused our retention to go down? Was it the external things beyond our control, or the logistical issues that arose? Now that our census and staffing are back to normal, will we see better results? How much longer do we continue the incentives before declaring them a success or failure?

We want to hear your thoughts as well. And keep watching along with us to see what happens next.