What is the addictions research and practice Specialist Interest Group?
A group of individuals with shared interests seeking to improve the link between research and clinical practice in addiction services; both in terms of translation of research into practice, but also its conduct in service delivery settings.
Our aims are
- To bring together interested and enthusiastic individuals in addictions research and practice settings
- To improve the accessibility of novel research findings to those working in, and experiencing, addiction services
- To remove the barriers perceived by healthcare professionals working in addictions services relating to accessing and performing service-based research and evaluation
- To inform research design and optimise impact through discussions around translatability and feasibility with those currently working in addiction service settings
- To improve the conversation between academic research and clinical practice through dedicated translation and feasibility dialogues
- To produce a series of themed actionable statements describing the implementation of novel research knowledge or practices into mainstream addiction services
- To curate an onward action plan for research, evaluation and impact assessment following the implementation of these actionable statements
Development of the SIG
The idea for the addictions research and practice SIG came from a conversation with a Professor, outside of my current organisation, who asked me ‘how do you introduce yourself and your role to new people?’ I was immediately stuck. My background is in neuropsychopharmacology and medicine, but I no longer practice clinically. I worked in addiction research before medicine, and now I’m back doing something similar but at the same time quite different. I perform empirical data collection studies but also make use of routinely collected clinical data. I currently work in a psychology department, but I’m by no means a psychologist, and my organisational base is in Wales, but my main academic collaborators are in England.
Around this time I was engaged in the Mental Health Research Incubator – the GROW programme (see website and Bluesky). I work in a small department and wanted to meet other people at my career stage who were perhaps facing similar challenges to me. As well as allowing me to grow my peer network, the Incubator provided me with a unique opportunity to engage in professional coaching. Here I realised that the main focus of my current research, and what I liked doing the most, was using my convoluted professional history to help the integration of new and exciting research into the lives of patients and healthcare professionals. And, that research and practice in addiction specifically, spoke to all my interests and values.
As such, myself and Nyle Davies, a fellow researcher at the University of South Wales, approached Emily, Bea and Shivani at the Mental Health Research Incubator about creating a forum where different members of a multidisciplinary team (MDT) could come along, hear about new research in their field, and inform the way this information might be implemented where they work. We were keen from the outset that the platform should have a voice from co-production experts. We also wanted the value of the whole MDT to be highlighted.
Ultimately, if the examples of research we share encourage people to feel that something similar, either in practice or in terms of evaluation, can be done where they work then that’s great! Research and evaluation do not always need to be complicated to lead to impact, but it often doesn’t seem like that when you’re browsing PubMed.
How it all works
Three or four months later we have launched the SIGs’ website hosted by the Mental Health Research Incubator, we have a BlueSky account, and a mailing account for people to sign up to. We are currently a group of eight, but are actively seeking occupational therapy, nutrition and dietetics, and social care leads.
We are hoping that our first meeting will take place via Microsoft Teams in July. We are actively encouraging people to sign-up to our mailing list (mhincubator.addictionsig@gmail.com), share links with colleagues and friends, and come along to see what the SIG is about.
Our meetings will cycle through themes, with each meeting within a theme focussed around a single topic. For example, theme one is Alcohol Dependence; topic one is Alcohol Related Brain Damage (ARBD). A researcher will present for 20 minutes work relating to ARBD; this will then be followed by an open discussion around the topic for 20 minutes, followed by ten minutes for individual breakout discussions for the development of actionable statements and accessibility/feasibility consensus of the research. The final ten minutes will be feeding back the outcomes of these discussions and generating a priority list of actionable statements relating to ARBD. A series of topics will then be cycled through within a single theme on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. By the end of a theme, it is envisaged that a list of recommendations (informed by researchers and those working in settings to deliver those recommendations) will be generated, reviewed by our addiction vision, direction and landscape leads, and disseminated.
Members of the SIG have said:
I’ve observed an unintentional shift in my academic research from understanding mechanisms to improving translation; but you don’t tend to get one without a good understanding of the other. It’s all about evidence and translatability of that evidence.
I’ve been in meetings where academics have been referred to as sitting in their ivory towers. But having been on the other side of the coin, I do appreciate that the highly curated and controlled environment of a research study conducted in a fancy clinical research facility does not necessarily translate to a friends and family support group on the Dudley Road in Birmingham, or a rehab centre in Llanharan for example.
Written by Dr Darren Quelch, Senior Research Fellow, and Dr Nyle Davies, Senior Research Assistant, Addictions Research Group, University of South Wales.
All IAS Blogposts are published with the permission of the author. The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute of Alcohol Studies.