A landmark three-year study to map and evaluate Lived Experience Recovery Organisations (LEROs) will launch next March. The £1.46m project will be funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and carried out by researchers at the University of Birmingham, in partnership with Recovery Connections and the University of Loughborough.
‘Although around 50 LEROs already operate across England, little is known about how they are commissioned, how they function, or how best to measure their impact,’ says the University of Birmingham, with commissioners highlighting the ‘urgent need’ for evidence to guide their decisions about including LEROs in local recovery-oriented systems of care.
The project, which was requested by OHID, will be led by the university’s Dr Amanda Farley and Professor Ed Day, who is also national recovery champion. Extensive involvement of people with lived experience will be central to the project, the university states, including a lived experience advisory panel to ‘shape the study throughout’.
The major elements of the study will be to map all of England’s LEROs to understand their commission arrangements, the services they offer and their data collection systems, alongside a range of in-depth case studies. There will also be a ‘rapid realist review to develop initial theory on how peer-led recovery support works and for whom’, as well as co-production of a ‘national core outcome set’. This will help both LEROs and commissioners to measure recovery-related benefits ‘more consistently and feasibly’, the university says.
‘Recovery is not only about gaining control over substance use – it’s about rebuilding a meaningful life,’ said Dr Farley. ‘LEROs provide exactly this kind of long-term, community-led support, yet there is currently no national picture of how they operate or how effective they are. We hope this research will give commissioners the tools they need to make confident, evidence-based decisions, and give LEROs the frameworks to demonstrate their important contribution to people’s recovery journeys.’
‘Treatment services can help people stop using substances, but staying in recovery and rebuilding networks, skills, and purpose is much harder,’ added Professor Day. ‘LEROs were recognised in the government’s 2021 drugs strategy, but commissioners still lack the evidence they need. This project will help ensure that lived experience is embedded at the heart of recovery systems.’
Meanwhile, a new joint report from OHID and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s homelessness pilot team has linked NDTMS with the Rough Sleeping Questionnaire to ‘provide unique insights’ into the relationship between homelessness, rough sleeping and substance misuse treatment.
‘People tended to experience substance misuse before housing difficulties, except for participants who experienced homelessness in childhood,’ the report states, with people who were long-term homeless ‘more commonly’ found to have either previously injected or be currently injecting.
The government recently pledged to halve rough sleeping as part of its new National Plan to End Homelessness, as the most recent figures from Shelter estimated that the number of people sleeping rough on any given night had risen by 20 per cent to almost 4,700. The number of people who died while homeless also increased by 9 per cent last year, to more than 1,600, with deaths related to drug or alcohol use accounting for more than 40 per cent.
Better outcomes through linked data: rough sleeping and substance misuse treatment available here