Understanding Addictions Treatment Consultants – Part One
Effective addiction rehabilitation is best achieved through a coordinated team of multidisciplinary addiction treatment consultants. When a person enters one of our quality rehab centres for drug and alcohol addiction treatment, it is of the utmost importance that their case is handled by a professional and experienced team of Addictions Treatment Consultants. This is due to the severity of the progressive and often fatal consequences of the disease of addiction.
All quality drug and alcohol rehab centres have multi-disciplinary teams
Consultants with a combined wealth of experience in their individual specialty, which may be addiction medicine and detoxification, counselling and group therapy, psychology, Social Work, Nursing or hospital management. The key roles these multidisciplinary teams of addiction treatment consultants play are important components in the successful treatment of addiction.
Understanding Addictions Treatment Consultants: Psychiatrist
Any quality rehab’s Addictions Treatment Consultants will include either a full-time resident or a consultant addiction psychiatrist. As psychiatrists first qualify as General Practitioners and then specialise in psychiatry, often doctors can choose addiction psychiatry and get even more specialised knowledge; they are an integral part of an effective addiction treatment team.
As an addiction treatment consultant the Addiction Psychiatrist is responsible for assessing patient’s mental condition, including their cognitive functioning (determining that there has been no significant fallout that may impair their ability to actively participate and benefit from the programme), any potential psychosis that would need anti-psychotic drugs and perhaps a short stay at a psychiatric ward to stabilise before recommencing addictions treatment and most importantly their potential risk of harm to either themselves of people around them.
It’s important that the above three possibilities are accurately assessed and dealt with to effectively contribute towards the addicted patients’ Treatment Plan. This Treatment Plan is negotiated and agreed upon between the patient and the focal addictions counsellor (as well as the team of addictions treatment consultants in Case Management) and changes its aims and objectives as the treatment progresses.
This addiction treatment consultant, the psychiatrist, is usually involved during the admission phase (on arrival or within the first 24-48 hours) at a drug or alcohol rehabilitation centre and intermittently throughout the process of addiction treatment.
Due to the numerous years of medical training ,the psychiatrist is also qualified to prescribe any medication that may be necessary for the resident nursing staff to administer and monitor the addicted patients during their stay at an alcohol detoxification and addiction treatment clinic. Medication is often essential for safe detoxification from a variety of substances, especially alcohol or benzodiazepines.
Medication is also sometimes necessary to balance out the otherwise chaotic emotional states due to psychological withdrawal symptoms that can bring about a crisis resulting in the patient’s self-discharge from treatment. Addictions treatment consultants will initially focus on the paramount task of patient retention and ensuring that the detoxifying patients suffering from cravings, depression, anxiety and agitation are appropriately medicated.
Drugs like cocaine result in psychological withdrawal symptoms, and addictions treatment consultants will be best placed to manage this effectively in a rehabilitation center. In these cases, medication serves to enable the patient to get the most out of the treatment process. Once a person is addicted, their eating and sleeping patterns will be abnormal, and addiction treatment consultants will help to establish a healthy sleeping and eating pattern throughout the rehabilitation process.
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In Part Two of our feature on addiction treatment consultants, we start off by focusing on Addictions Counsellors, and in Part Three, we look at medical care and nursing. Part three of this article on addiction treatment consultants is found here.