Alice Bowen & Paul Lennon
Biography
Over the past six years, I have been coordinating the Addictions Service User Research Group (SURG), which is a collaboration between The National Addictions Centre (King’s College London) and The Aurora Project, a peer mentoring service. All eleven members of SURG are drug and alcohol service users, who meet monthly to discuss upcoming research. The central aim of the group is to build meaningful and reciprocal relationships between addiction researchers and service users when thinking through and conducting research.
Recently, I have also been working with researchers at King’s to develop a recovery app, SURE Recovery, which is now available to download for free. The app aims to support people in recovery to achieve their personal goals. Moving forward, I will work on the next phase of the project which will explore improvements to the app and use data gathered via the app to further understand substance use and recovery.