Improving research career opportunities in the field of substance use treatment

If we want effective, efficient and equitable treatment services for people who have issues with their use of alcohol or other drugs, then we need good research to generate evidence on what works, and how we can improve as a field.

That’s why the Government has developed a specific programme – the Addiction Healthcare Goals – to fund specific research projects and develop the ‘ecosystem’ for research related to addition, so that we’re asking the right questions, we have the full range of relevant organisations working together to answer these, and we then take the findings and they make a positive impact on how we support people.

Collective Voice have been working closely with the Goals team to make sure service providers are at the heart of this work, and in November 2024, we brought together a range of staff to discuss how we might better support staff to engage with research through their career in the additions field.

We identified a few key challenges but also some good ideas for how we might improve things.  These have been noted by the Goals team, and will help inform their work to support career pathways in our field that focus on research.

Some of the challenges were about the system we work within and the (lack of) incentives to engage in research.  For example, it didn’t seem common for service contracts to build much funding in for research, because – quite understandably – the priority has to be on using the funding to actually deliver that direct service.

This means that where research does take place involving service provision, the impetus and design tends to come from the academic partner, rather than being proactively driven or shaped by the treatment provider.

On career pathways specifically, the group felt that research isn’t embedded into the training or career pathway for most staff and roles, meaning that for those staff who are keen to be more actively involved in research tey might end up moving to a different role or career, either within a provider organisation – as a ‘research lead’, for example – or actually leaving the charity sector and direct service provision more completely, becoming an academic.

As a result, there’s a risk of something of a ‘brain drain’, as services ‘lose’ some of their most passionate and professionally curious staff, who committed to improving knowledge and support, to research careers.

But here’s where the positive ideas came in.  The group floated the possibility of learning from professions such as psychology, where it’s more common to combine some practice and research work within the same role or career path.  With these pathways for other roles, organisations would be able to offer a more interesting, varied career path, while retaining some of their most valuable staff.

It was also suggested that we should encouraging a two-way street between academia and practice, with pathways to encourage academic researchers to work in provider services.

This could involve making sure that those involved in research see working in substance use services as a realistic, rewarding opportunity.

And this needn’t just be about client-facing roles.  Participants discussed tailoring, advertising and actively promoting analysis and research roles to those with academic careers, and making sure that universities and research institutes understand the value of these kinds of career breaks, specifically relating to charities and the field of addiction.  This should be part of a plan to improve links between universities and addition charities more generally.

In writing about this, I should probably declare my own personal interest!  I got interested in this field as a PhD student researching drinking in the ‘night-time economy’, first joined a Drug and Alcohol Action Team as an information and research officer doing analysis and evidence monitoring, before becoming a commissioning manager.  So for good or bad I’m an example of this kind of career pathway – though I’ve not properly returned to academia at any point yet…

It’s therefore probably no surprise that I’m interested in – and passionate about – this strand of our work at Collective Voice, but I hope it will interest lots of you too, and we can work together to drive this agenda forward.

There’s loads of ideas I haven’t been able to cover properly in this short blog, so I’d encourage you to read the report – or at least the executive summary – here.

And please get in touch if you’d like to be more involved in these kinds of discussions in the future; we’re building an active network of staff who are interested in research across our member organisations and beyond.