SKEPDAH Project meets to talk about Dissemination of this projects outputs

The Skills and Knowledge Exchange Project for Drug and Alcohol Helplines (SKEPDAH) was designed as a way for Drug and Alcohol Helplines to learn from each other and to exchange experience in a sustainable manner. This project is funded by the European programme for education, training, youth and sport (Erasmus +). It is a Key Action 2 Partnership Project, which focuses on Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices. The project has been made possible with the funding of the Irish National Agency, Léargas and is running from January 2017 to August 2018.

The idea for this project was born from a survey of drug helplines in early 2015 when participants were asked what topics they felt they needed further insights and training on. This was followed up by a second more detailed survey in December 2015 from which three topics of interest emerged. It was decided that this project would focus on meeting the needs of Drug and Alcohol Helplines by addressing these three topics and that the best way to do that was for us to work during the project to design curriculae for Helplines on each of the three topics that could be used, reused and shared into the future.

During the life of the project, there will be three Transnational Partner meetings during which information, experience and resources will be shared and used to develop a draft curriculum on each of the topics. These curriculae will then be trialed or used within our individual services to help inform training and support needs for our staff and any learnings will be fed back to inform that final drafts.

The final meeting of this project was the Dissemination meeting and it took place in Larnaca, Cyprus on June 18^th and 19^th 2018. The hosts PERSEAS Counselling Centre for Adolescents and Adults arranged for the meeting to take place at an office in Larnaca as a cooler and more cost effective option that for the partnership to meet in Nicosia. The topic for the two-day meeting was Dissemination, as the three Curricula were finalized and launched and dissemination materials were created and developed so that we can share the work of this project through email, newsletters and YouTube.

The Irish Partner had created a Pecha Kucha style presentation. The idea of which is share the essence of the projects context, work and outcomes using 20 slides, to appear for 20seconds each with minimal text or bullet points. This was created and then narrated with an emphasis on the visual impact of the images used. Though the final presentation has only 19 slides, we’ve otherwise remainded loyal to the pecha kucha idea and created a nice dissemination output in the process. This is now available to view on YouTube and again directs viewers to visit www.fesat.org for more information.

The Pecha Kucha presentation:

During our two day meeting we also created short video inputs from partners, setting a context for each of the three curriculae. These are available to share and disseminated and again are a way of pointing people to the website so that people can download the project outputs.

Our Norwegian and Belgian partners sharing a talk on the curriculum on Burnout Prevention:

Our Dutch partner introducing the curriculum on NPS:

Our Cypriot partner presenting the curriculum on Dual Diagnosis (Co-occurring Substance Use and Mental Health):

By the end of the two day meeting, we were in a position to evaluate what went well and what additional learning could be taken from this project as a whole. It was agreed that language was a consistent challenge and that perhaps structuring the meetings differently might have helped that. We had further discussions around any future projects and what topics might be of relevance to those present.

Partners in this project are:

The HSE Drugs & Alcohol Helpline (Ireland); De DrugLijn, VAD (Belgium); Fracarita Bulgaria, National Drugs, Alcohol and Gambling Helpline (Bulgaria); SICAD (Portugal); PERSEAS (Cyprus); RUStelefonen (Norway); Drugs Infolijn, Trimbos Instituut (The Netherlands); Basis e.V. (Germany) and the Training Exchange Ltd (UK).

For the remaining time of this project, all partners will redouble their efforts to spread the word and share the curriculae and the project dissemination materials as widely as possible, as our goal is for the learning to be shared not only across Drug and Alcohol Helplines, but to all helplines and organisations for which these topics have some resonance.