Substance abuse has a severe impact on the South African population. Various
organizations, governmental and non-governmental, take on the challenge to assist in
the treatment of substance abuse. Several gaps have been identified in dealing with
substance abuse in South Africa. One of these gaps includes regular audits of
treatment services and prevention programmes. One of the major concerns is that
most primary prevention programmes appear to be implemented in the absence of
evidence on their effectiveness and are mostly implemented on an ad hoc basis. The
respondent organizations appear to display a poor understanding of evaluation. It was
evident that there is a need for a systematic review of what works in the context of
substance abuse prevention among the South African population as well as the
development of an effective regulatory regime regarding primary prevention
activities. Evaluation can be an important tool to provide monitoring, as well as a tool
to identify strengths and weaknesses in treatment programmes.
In light of the above, the South Coast Recovery Centre, a substance abuse treatment
centre that operates in the private sector, was approached to evaluate the effectiveness
of its treatment programme. The research focused on gaining insight into and
exploring the strengths and weakness of the programme based on how patients
experienced the programme and how satisfied they were with it.
The use of multimethod approach which included positivist and interpretative
approaches to evaluation was viewed as an appropriate method to use for the study in
facilitating an understanding of the patient’s experience of the programme and how
satisfied they were with the intervention they received. The study is both qualitative
and quantitative in nature and used questionnaires and focus group interviews as data
sources. All participants in the study were inpatients at the South Coast Recovery
Centre. Frequency distributions, chi square analysis, as well as a thematic analysis
were used to analyze the data of the study.
The study concluded that patients were in general satisfied with the treatment
programme. The programme provided opportunity for behavior changes and
introspective learning. They were satisfied with professionals’ skills and behaviours,
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types of interventions provided, efficacy and accessibility. Areas that patients were
not satisfied with included: the facilitated involvement of relatives, the provision of
information, and the large amount of residents in the programme.
Recommendations were made with regards to programme improvement. The
recommendations included the following:
a. A coherent programme with clear links between outcome objectives and
programme activities should be created.
b. The number of counsellors in the programme should be reconsidered.
c. The number of patients that should be allowed in the programme should be
reconsidered.
d. A platform for counsellors to deal with their personal emotions and counter
transference should be created.
e. Counsellors’ emotional involvement with patients should be addressed and
exposed.
f. More structured leisure activities that use interactive learning styles could be
implemented in order to facilitate the learning of social skills.
g. An awareness of possible comorbid mental disorders should be developed.
h. Patients can be more involved with the cost aspect of the programme in order
to facilitate more ownership of their treatment process.
i. Provision should be made in the programme to allow for more involvement of
relatives. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/411 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Booyens, Welmi. |
| Contributors | Cartwright, Duncan J. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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