Grant: Operating Grant

Addiction treatment providers everywhere share the common goals of delivering services to treat and prevent problems related to substance use, and support their clients in achieving long-term recovery. The contexts of services vary considerably, however, in terms of local levels and types of need, programming, and resources. To ensure that services are delivered in an effective and equitable manner, population-based research is needed to monitor treatment processes and outcomes, and to identify potential gaps in the system. Remarkably few studies have addressed these issues in Canada, hampering efforts to improve the quality and delivery of services for addiction. Using data from an information system that monitors clients and their use of services for drug and alcohol problems in Ontario, we will measure and characterise clients' patterns of service use over time. Looking at people's encounters with the addiction treatment system over an 8-year period (2005-2012), we will consider a number of important aspects of care quality, such as whether clients in detoxification received additional counseling or treatment, whether clients in outpatient treatment received at least 4 outpatient visits in the first 6 weeks after admission, and whether clients in residential treatment received additional outpatient services to assist them with transitioning back to the community. We will also look at whether and how client characteristics, such as ethnicity, mandates to attend treatment, and homelessness, affect the treatment process and quality of care. An important contribution of this work will be the findings pertaining to how such client characteristics interact to influence encounters with the treatment system over time. This work will help to improve our understanding of addiction treatment system equity and effectiveness, and our ability to identify and address any gaps in the system.