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Would you like to increase your awareness of substance misuse? Do you know how you would respond to questions about alcohol and other drugs?

This will be delivered via Zoom and hosted by Phil Harris (Training Exchange). You will be sent a Zoom invite nearer the time.

Motivational interviewing is a leading approach to increase motivation and commitment to change. It was first developed in the alcohol field, but as they had identified that there was no specific addiction psychology, it has been developed in a wide range of areas including social work, offending, mental health and homelessness fields. It has proven particularly effective with stuck or entrenched clients from a wide range of backgrounds. This course maps the key factors that elicit change and demonstrates how Motivational Interviewing works alongside these forces. Drawing on both person centred and directive techniques, it offers practical skills to assist the workers to helps clients articulate and recognise the need for change. As such, it is an effective primer to increase engagement with clients who have not yet achieved a sufficient level of commitment and move them into action without confrontation.

Who is the Course For?: Motivational Interviewing is useful for a wide range of social issues. Its primary focus is on igniting motivation to change, and so it is helpful when clients are stuck in problems and not advancing in change. It is a useful skill in all change and recovery based services such as mental health, substance misuse, offending, social work, domestic violence, supported housing, young people’s services, family work and more besides.

Method of Delivery: The training programme comes with an extensive booklet for each participant. The training course is highly interactive, even during presentations. It uses a wide variety of learning approaches including presentations, pairs and small group work exercises and self-assessment. The course is also supported with free e-learning and further resources to re-cap, review and refresh learning.

• Increase understanding around race, racism and systemic racism as well as how it manifests in relation to social care specifically
• Exploring disparities from statistics that have been caused by systemic racism specific to social care and other core English institutions
• Understanding our own unconscious bias and social conditioning to help us better challenge ourselves, our thoughts and our beliefs
• A deep dive into white privilege, power & advantage
• Cultural awareness and how being aware of cultural norms can help us be more culturally competent when supporting people
• Learning what microaggression are and what we can do to mitigate against them and how to support somebody who has experienced a microaggression
• Exploring Language the nuances and connotations associated with some outdated terms
• How to be an anti-racism ally and what this means as an individual, team and organisation