Title : A model for breaking addiction, built from the ground up - V
Abstract:
Integrated outcome Measures - Beyond abstinence: Employment, housing, family and life skills
How you measure recovery determines what kind of recovery you produce. If you measure abstinence, you produce abstinence. If you measure programme completion, you produce programme completions. If you measure what actually constitutes a functioning life, you produce something different. The measurement drives the model. Get it wrong and the model follows it in the wrong direction.
A person who is sober but unemployed, homeless, isolated, and in debt has not recovered. They have stopped using. These are not the same thing. The absence of the problem is not the presence of a life. A person who leaves a programme clean but without a job, without stable housing, without the financial foundations of an adult life, is going back. Maybe not this week.But the pressure will build and the easiest solution available will be the one they already know.
The Integrated Outcome Measures framework assesses recovery across six domains. Employment: residents transition into full-time external employment within 4–7 months and are fully off welfare payments within that timeframe. Not a supported work programme. A real job with a real employer. Housing: graduates leave with their own independent tenancy and furnishings, not transitional housing, their own front door. Debt clearance: financial damage from addiction, whether $5,000 or $500,000, is addressed within the programme. Identity restoration: 100 points of identification, tax affairs in order, superannuation active, practical markers of adult functioning systematically restored because addiction destroys them and most programmes never address them. Family reconciliation: relational damage is addressed throughout the programme, not handed to them as a problem to deal with at discharge. Life skills: cooking, budgeting, conflict resolution, household management, the practical capability to maintain what the programme produced.
Most programmes count what is easy to count: beds filled, days completed, people discharged successfully. These measures serve reporting requirements. They do not tell you whether a person’s life changed.
The question I ask at the end of every programme is simple: could this person sustain themselves if we walked away tomorrow? If the answer is no, the programme is not finished. This session challenges the field to ask that harder question and presents the framework and the practical means of applying it in programme design and outcome reporting.
