Recovery Housing in Scotland: Mapping and capacity survey of providers 2022/23

2. Methodology

A mapping and capacity survey was sent by email to a list of pre-identified potential recovery housing facilities. This list was developed from a prior scoping exercise, where respondents were asked to provide the name, location and, where possible, contact details for recovery housing facilities or providers they were aware of, and to forward on the request for information to anyone who may have relevant information. Scoping work took place in June 2023. The following organisations and groups were consulted as part of this exercise:

• all residential rehabilitation providers,
• frontline services across Scotland who respond to the Drug and Alcohol Information System (DAISy),
• people with lived experience via the Scottish Recovery Consortium (SRC) and the Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol and Drugs (SFAD),
• General Practitioner leads,
• the Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (SHAAP), and
• members of the Residential Rehabilitation Development Working Group (RRDWG).

Subsequent desk research identified whether the facilities put forward still existed and if they indeed offered a recovery house-like service in its broadest sense: namely that they offered housing for people recovering from problem substance use and were not a residential rehabilitation facility. The final list was shared with Alcohol and Drug Partnership (ADP) leads as a further means to quality assure the longlist.

The final list consisted of 43 potential recovery housing-type facilities to whom the mapping and capacity survey was distributed by email^[4]. Additionally, the housing departments at each of Scotland’s councils were contacted by email to determine if they offered any recovery housing type accommodation. Recognising that people residing in Scotland may travel for a recovery housing service, the survey was distributed to 17 recovery housing type services in England. These England-based facilities were identified as part of the scoping exercise and underwent desk-research as described above. The survey was designed to only capture information from facilities elsewhere in the UK that had current or past residents who had previously either resided or attended a residential treatment service in Scotland (see Appendix A).

A desired outcome of this research was to inform the development of an operational definition of recovery housing. Therefore, an inclusive and generally low threshold approach to participation was adopted in the research design phase, whereby the survey was open to any service that self-identified as offering a recovery house-type service. Despite efforts to capture all services, some will inevitably not have been captured by this research.

The survey was composed of 60 questions on topics such as the characteristics of the facility (e.g. workforce, number of beds/places); identification, referral, and admittance of residents; resident life; and resident outcomes. The survey (see in Appendix A) also employed routing to minimise burden of completion. The survey included both multiple choice and open text questions, with the majority being open text questions due to the exploratory nature of this work. To maximise the utility and appropriateness of the survey questions, a draft version of the questionnaire was distributed to the RRDWG; relevant stakeholders from Public Health Scotland, Health Improvement Scotland, and Scotland Excel; and relevant Scottish Government policy colleagues for comments.

Data was collected between the 19^th of July and the 15^th of August 2023. Follow-up emails and calls were made to providers in the initial long list to ensure they had the opportunity to be included in this research where they did not initially respond to the email invitation.