Treatment of Chemical Dependency

Psychiatric and chemical dependency in-patient and out-patient treatment to adolescents.

Recently, a major operational change took place at the institution, viz. heretofore long-term residential care was replaced by short-term residential care followed by out-patient consultation. The change constituted a conjuncture, i.e. a critical state of affairs for the facility, inasmuch as management, healthcare professionals, and patients had to adapt to fundamentally different management and healthcare delivery modalities. The alleged proximate cause of the conjuncture was the drastically reduced insurance coverage of treatment costs - a move the insurance companies claimed had become necessary in the face of steeply rising healthcare delivery costs.

As a member of Asylum's direct-delivery healthcare staff, the researcher was in a privileged position to observe if and how the organizational and operational changes were affecting employees' behavior at work, and, in particular, attitudes towards the changes and the perceived agents of these changes. Inasmuch as he transacted with both Healthcare Professionals and Administrative Middle- Managers on a daily basis over a substantial period, the researcher developed a special appreciation for the perceived differences in attitudes between these two categories of professional personnel. This appreciation was richly enhanced by the application of concepts and techniques of observation and interpretation based on insights provided by t

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als. Should the researcher's basic assumptions be thereby validated, the results of the study could serve as an objective basis for re-orienting personnel management and therapeutic strategies ultimately aiming at optimizing treatment modalities and personnel utilization under the new operational mechanisms. Inasmuch as the conjuncture was not confined to Asylum, but affected all similar facilities, appropriately re-oriented human and therapeutic resources could turn out to be of significant benefit to all such institutions and their patients. The survey eventually carried out qualified as an applied sociological project, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, in that it was conducted in cooperation with a working healthcare facility for its practical benefit as well as for that of similar institutions. The project was subtitled A Micro-Analysis in Social Change, because, conceptually and methodologically, the researcher conducted the study within the perspectives of Symbolic Interactionist and Dramaturgical theories of sociology -in particular that of Erving Goffman. The choice of theoretical concepts and methodological orientation was dictated by the advantage of the researcher's position as

Category: Medical - T