Darren Worthington, Report from 2010

I am happy to report that we have sustained growth in the last financial year through a combination of innovation, hard work and increased confidence and investment from existing funders.  In the year, income grew by 29% with the introduction of four new services:

• The Oxfordshire Community Drug and Alcohol Service
• The Thames Valley-wide Enhanced Prolific and Priority Offender Scheme
• The East Berkshire Prescribing Service
• The East Berkshire Alcohol Service.

Continued growth at a time when austerity measures are starting to take hold is no mean achievement and indicates that we must be doing something right where it matters most: front-line delivery. 

With so much background noise being generated by the continuing debates into what works, it would have been easy for us to forget this, or even start to doubt our own methods. The great and the good have debated abstinence, recovery, legalisation, management of offenders, rehabilitation, the ‘Methadone burden’and anything else that might help us to unlock the secret to tackling substance misuse problems and still, it seems, we don’t have a definitive and collective view of what success actually is.

Part of the problem is that success means different things to different people.Speak to any politician and their measureof success will be reduced crime rates andshorter dole queues. Speak to a front-lineworker and they’ll tell you it is when theindividual has discovered their identityand true sense of worth. It makes senseto me to join the dots and realise that success for one will ultimately lead to success for the other. At SMART we believe this wholly and our key objective among thousands each year, is to treat the individual. If we achieve this we have succeeded and made a real contribution to our communities.

As you read on you will get a sense of the true impact of our work from the client stories being told. From these you will also understand the impact of substance misuse and how damaging it is to so many people. And what it is that we are doing to minimise this damage and ensure that every contact with a SMART service achieves a lasting outcome.

Our current focus is on improving the services we deliver through staff development and the introduction of new standards - we see the delivery of quality interventions as being the surest way of protecting investment, achieving real value, and making positive impacts on those with whom we work. Our commitment to this has been proven this year through significant investments from reserves to develop a Clinical Governance framework and a variety of staff training initiatives.

This investment in improving standards will continue through next year with additional funds being sought to develop research that will help us further understand the recovery journey and what this actually means to the client. We are also planning to invest in those areas of business that we see as providing the most potential to grow and make a significant contribution to people’s lives, particularly education programmes and interventions that are geared to clients with specific needs.

On the immediate horizon is the Howard House Project in Oxfordshire, which is a ten-bed residential detoxification service for drug and alcohol users. The service is planned to open in November 2010 and we are excited by the opportunities it will bring to SMART and our clients.

As always, I’d like to offer my thanks to everyone connected with SMART: the staff team, mentors, volunteers, commissioners and supporters of our work, for their commitment to making this another successful year.

Darren Worthington

Chief Executive