Project Description
Quality of Care in the Therapeutic Community
PI: Suzanne Wenzel; co-PI: Maria Orlando
Funded by: National Institute on Drug Abuse
The effectiveness of substance abuse treatment is well-established. Data show that clients who successfully complete treatment generally decrease both their drug use and criminal behavior while increasing their social functioning in areas such as employment. What is lacking, however, is an understanding of the treatment process that is responsible for producing client outcomes. Understanding treatment process is critical to understanding and improving quality of care. The goal of this study is to improve the quality of care in substance abuse treatment programs by refining and validating a treatment process monitoring tool and examining how treatment programs make use of information from such a tool within a continuous quality improvement framework. The process monitoring tool is based on an instrument previously developed by RAND in collaboration with Phoenix House, the largest therapeutic community for substance abuse treatment in the United States. Using state-of-the-art techniques, the tool will be refined and validated over time with input from clients in Phoenix House treatment programs throughout the United States. This study on quality of care represents an innovative step for substance abuse treatment research and practice, both for the therapeutic community specifically and the substance abuse treatment services field more generally.
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