Handle it! – Strategies for addiction treatment in New Psychoactive Substances in Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Handle it! – Strategies for addiction treatment in New Psychoactive Substances in Europe

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; Access for disadvantaged; Overcoming skills mismatches (basic/transversal)

Project Summary

The project “Handle it! – Strategies for addiction treatment in New Psychoactive Substances in Europe” is aimed at interdisciplinary professional staff members in the addiction care and treatment system like therapists, social workers, addiction consultants and physicians. The use of new psychoactive substances (NPS) is an increasing challenge for the addiction treatment all over the world, both in terms of the individual health damage potential (cardiovascular arrest, psychosis, long-term brain damage), as well as the controllability of consumption, because common rapid tests often fail to indicate NPS. NPS-users are a hard-to-reach, highly marginalized target group that is not linked to the health and care system within reason. Depending on national legal prohibitions, NPS are used to be sold legally in so-called smart shops in many European countries, but tends to shift to the Internet.
The reaction patterns at the level of the EU Member States and the EU itself are normally limited to changes in the law to prosecute and control the trade. On the other hand, there are often no adequate prevention- or treatment-strategies to find helpful solutions for NPS users. Although isolated local or regional approaches have been developed, there is no interconnected or even transnational approach, nor is there a chance to reflect on and develop these approaches. The European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has already indicated those structural deficits in addiction care in its last two annual reports. Not only that NPS-users rarely find appropriate addiction care and treatment services. When they use these services, the professionals cannot adequately handle them and their set of problems, because they only have to recourse to their insufficient intervention skills in cases of users of „normal“ illegal drugs.
The project “Handle it!” analyzes, connects and develope approaches and strategies in outpatient and inpatient addiction care and treatment services in a European exchange of good practice between professional staff members of seven social organisations from Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, Portugal and Germany. They train their vocational skills to design creative, new solutions and to improve structural and conceptual strategies for a better health care for NPS-users. So the participants become NPS-practice-experts and multipliers, who transfer the project results into their organizations and are capable to train their collegues. Several week-long Learning-Teaching-Training-Activities allow a transfer of organizational knowledge from the local to the international level. The knowledge will be reflected, creatively stimulated and redirected to the professional staff members of the partner organisations as manageable tools . The methods are expert lectures, topic-related workshops and working groups, research work, good-practice visits, case studies and case reviews and the development of treatment concepts for example.
The project “Handle it!” creates an online platform, integrating social media channels, especially a YouTube channel. The project activities are accompanied by a mobile reporting, which allows an easier knowledge transfer to the treatment centers of the project partners and increases significantly the distribution and transparency to the public community, too. Thus videos and other media products will be produced, which show results of the activities, interviews with participants and experts or deep insights into the situation of NPS-users. So a larger community gets new knowledge, ideas and strategies about the problems of NPS-users and professionals of addiction care services and can send their opinions, experiences and feedback to the project team.
That way the project “Handle it!” is able to create an active exchange of good practice from the local to the international and even to the digital level on “new psychoactive substances” and their users, which will be usable in the long term not only for the project partners and the participants, but for the entire vocational training in addiction care and health services in Europe.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 179900,47 Eur

Project Coordinator

Therapieverbund Ludwigsmühle gGmbH & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Comunità di Venezia Società Cooperativa Sociale
• Humanitarna organizacija “Zajednica Susret”
• IREFREA – INSTITUTO EUROPEU DE INVESTIGACAO DE FACTORES DE RISCO DE CRIANCA E ADOLESCENTES
• MEGALLO CSOPORT ALAPITVANY SZENVEDELYBETEGEKERT
• Therapiesalon im Wald
• Baden Württembergischer Landesverband für Prävention und Rehabilitation gGmbH