Dragos Dragomir-Stanciu
I am Dragos Dragomir, a clinical and forensic psychologist with over 12 years’ experience in the field of mental health and addiction recovery. I have worked across all three sectors of industry and I am particularly interested in how they can combine in creating sustainable frameworks of intervention within the mental health field. My main skills lay in the strategic development and implementation of policies, procedures and treatment programmes, quality and performance management, service management and research and innovation in mental health care. Currently I work as Clinical Director for the Gordon Moody Association, an organisation that offers support and treatment for those most affected by gambling related harm. In this role I am particularly interested in developing models for the delivery of the best possible care to our clients and researching the development of outcome and effectiveness measurement tools.
Evaluation of a gambling therapy outreach support model as an intervention response to COVID-19 lockdown
Aim: The COVID 19 lockdown has created a gap in provision of support to individuals who were experiencing serious harm from Gambling. The aim of the present paper is to evaluate the impact of the outreach support model implemented by GMA as a response to the lockdown situation.
Intervention: The intervention included virtual 1-2-1 support for clients waiting to commence treatment and virtual 1-2-1 and group support for clients who have completed treatment. As well as the structured support we have run Q and A sessions every week facilitated by recovering gambling addicts.
Participants and setting: Retrospective electronic files data were collected for 300+ clients who have received virtual support in the 3 months prior the lockdown started and 3 months after the lockdown started.
Design and Measurement: We have used a well-matched comparison-group design to compare the number, frequency and average time of interventions delivered throughout the two 3 months periods, as well as the results from the clinical outcome measurement tools: PGSI and CORE-10.
Findings and conclusions: Increasing our outreach capacity during lockdown has enabled us to see a grow from 30 outgoing interactions a month to 250 a week. We have seen a significant reduction in PGSI and CORE 10 scores following outreach intervention post lockdown. The delivery of the outreach support model has helped us reaching people from a wide range of backgrounds, better understanding the varied and complex issues our clients are presenting with as well as guiding the future direction of our service.
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