Carolyn Edwards from Liverpool’s Genie in the Gutter was at Digital Futures: Delivering Growth as part of the Health is Wealth Conference. She talked about how they are working with adults tackling drug and alcohol treatment as well as digital inclusion, empowerment and treatment.
Genie in the Gutter is a bridge to recovery service, providing informed choices around drug and alcohol treatment to active substance misusers committed to exploring recovery options.
We are a creative drug and alcohol treatment agency. There are several different online apps and facilities for people who have a dual diagnosis of mental health and substance abuse. However they vary in terms of quality and accessibility. Working with PSS, a social enterprise, and the CCG we worked with our users and attendees to road test online applications and rate them.
We had 25 road testers, some were service users from PSS, others from Imagine Independent and they had various skills and various levels of confidence and accessibility as well as various health needs. They tested the online dual diagnosis resources and gave their recommendation.
It was important to get people involved right from the start, talking about what they’d like from the apps and how they could find it making it more accessible. The findings have proved to be beneficial to healthcare developers and it’s more cost effective to include them right from the beginning.
Digital inclusion is important to us. We were winners of the Mayor’s Award for Social Innovation and we run digital inclusion initiatives. Many of our service users are crying out for it. They are already marginalised and with so many services that you have to go online for these people on the extreme margins can often find themselves even more excluded.
Each of the road testers had mental health issues, mainly depression. 67% had substance abuse issues including both alcohol and drugs. They conducted a robust evaluation of each service. There were two they really liked, Breaking Free online which is an wide reaching evidence based online key working programme for dual diagnosis and Beating the Blues. We had people presenting on the forum sites with suicidal tendencies and people from the online programme got in touch to guarantee their safety, which our users found amazing as they were obviously monitoring the forums and boards and were contacting people who were high risk. Living Life to the Full was the only one that was free that we were able to recommend.
Our main passion is to motivate people and engage with those who are marginalised.
When the app developers came in to see the results of the road testing they found it useful. A lot (of our service users) find it very difficult to trust people. Patronisation came us as quite an issue, being treated as though they are quite childlike and some of the apps were like that. Trust is an important part of it. If they trust then they will tell the complete truth. Cost is a big part of digital inclusion. We work with a lot of unemployed people and the cost of the apps is something they talked to us about.
Find out more about Genie in the Gutter