BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – IN an effort to strengthen human and institutional capacity in the areas of prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of drug abuse, the Organisation of American States and the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission CICAD recently sponsored a five-day workshop at the St. Kitts Marriott Hotel.
The workshop was organised by the Demand Reduction Section of CICAD, an agency within the OAS that is responsible for, among other things, coordinating the efforts of member countries in the fight against illegal drugs.
It was held in two parts; the first from March 12-14 which focused on Evaluation Systems and the second from March 15-16 with focus on Assessments Training.
According to Alexandra Hill, Project Manager for the Training Certification Programme, the lack of qualified and specialised professionals to deal with the prevention and drug treatment issue is one of the biggest challenges being faced in the region.
“Historically, these problems have been helped by civil societies or recovering addicts, religious groups. Drug abuse is a disease, so we need specialists to deal with the disease. So the main objective of this project is to qualify, through training and certification, all of the service providers that are involved in drug abuse prevention and treatment,” Hill said.
The Project Manager said that before going into the actual training of the service providers, they have to develop and conduct assessments to see where these prevention and treatment institutions are and what the profiles of the human resources are that are working with them.
“We have focal point from every member state of the Caribbean and they are receiving training on how to conduct the assessment. After we have the assessment, we intend to present them in the Bahamas in the month of June or July. And with the assessment, we will be able to fit and tailor our training and strategies, and development based on the needs of these people and society,” she added.
Esther Best, Chairperson of the Advisory Committee for the Caribbean Prevention and Treatment Training and Certification Programme (PROCCER) and Manager of the National Drug Council in Trinidad and Tobago, said that in the region most of the drug treatment and rehabilitation are taken by NGO’s.
“Most of those persons may not be qualified, in terms of academic qualifications, but most of them have been doing it for a long time. So what we’re trying to do is bring a level of respect to the area so that we have all of the persons certified from the basic going through the four levels, so that we now have a regional certification mechanism that will allow people to say they are certified to do this and not just doing it from the heart anymore, but they now have the skills and competency to do the programmes in treatment,” Best said.
Best said too that there are many persons who deal with prevention programmes and that her organisation is hoping to streamline those prevention messages.
“And we want people to understand that when they deliver those prevention messages they understand the target group, the type of message they would deliver, so that they would be able to measure the impact of those messages,” she said.
Best added that the assessment exercise would give them more concrete data on how many agencies exist, how many persons are in need of training and what are their levels of training.
On completion of this procedure, Best declared that they would then be able to begin training with the basic modules of prevention and treatment, taking it straight up to level four.
She said the levels are Basic, Technical, Professional and Expert.
The participating countries include St. Lucia, Suriname, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize and Barbados.
