services assessment

 

rainbow quality system: the swedish experience

 

Excerpts from original by Mr. Arne Kristiansen

Evaluating the outcomes of a treatment program is a common, although essential, procedure. Evaluating the success or the quality of a third party program while being oneself evaluated is much more original, and this is the approach that Dianova Sweden adopted two years ago.

In Sweden it is required by law that all organizations working in the field of addiction treatment must evaluate the quality of their services by means of a proven methodology.

However, while some treatment methods utilize specific evaluation tools, nothing had yet been designed for a biopsychosocial approach in a residential or semi-residential treatment setting.

The collaboration between Dianova Sweden and Rainbow made it possible to find a remedy to the problem with a participative project aimed at implementing an original services evaluation instrument tailored to our specific characteristics.

Rainbow Sweden is an organization the objective of which is to encourage cooperation between private organizations working in the field of addiction treatment and prevention. During past few years the number of people admitted to private residential treatment facilities increased substantially. Overall, private capacity has now reached 400 beds, compared to state-run facilities which offer 327 beds.

At the beginning of 2004 Rainbow contacted me with the objective of creating a services evaluation instrument which would be acknowledged by Swedish authorities. The Swedish government agreed to fund the project, which was launched with the simple objective of designing an easy-to-use instrument which would also have to be well-accepted by both staff and clients.

The primary interest of the Rainbow Quality System is that the project development involved all private treatment organizations in a participative research framework. Every step of the project was duly approved by each organization. The project was finalized at the end of 2005 and all organizations began to utilize the instrument as of the first of the following year.

The RQS includes two main elements, the revision procedures and the documentation of the partnering organizations. The revision procedure is especially interesting, because it requires that every organization be visited at least once a year by the representatives of another partner organization. The latter will be responsible for carefully reviewing the new evaluation procedures, and they will thereby be able to assess the various criteria utilized by every organization.

Individual elements evaluated by the RQS are as follows: client empowerment, the presence of positive personal relationships, abstinence from drugs, work assignments, social integration, personal development and openness. The documentation comprises seven questionnaires that may be utilized either totally or partially by the subject organizations.

Questionnaires deal with the entry into the program, the individual follow-up, the organization itself, the end of the treatment program and the person's situation after his reintegration, including any social services provided by the community. After two years of usage, our new evaluation procedure proved to be extremely efficient.

The RQS could help the organizations working in this field preserve their individuality, maintain the best service and program quality for the people they serve, and implement a highly valued collaboration between organizations.