Participants from 20 treatment centres from around the world met from Dec. 5 to 9, 2005, in Vienna, Austria, where they embarked on the process of building the Network and its capabilities.
UCLA ISAP has been chosen as the lead centre for the treatment capacity building arm of this UNODC effort, with Richard A. Rawson (ISAP Associate Director) and Walter Ling (ISAP Director) leading the effort to create and deliver a training package.

This United Nations project addresses the disparate technical capacity of many regions of the world to provide diversified and effective drug treatment and rehabilitation services, including support for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. ISAP is coordinating the effort to deliver a multivolume training package to the Network. The ultimate goal is to increase the capacity of the treatment centres to deliver a variety of treatment and rehabilitation interventions in all represented regions over the next two years.

The Network of Resource Centres, under ISAP’s coordination, has assessed the training/capacity-building needs of all the regions represented by Network members through needs assessment surveys and the international exchange of staff from many of the Network Resource Centres.

ISAP has used the knowledge gained from these needs assessments to develop a series of capacity building training volumes. Through these assessments, the Network has identified initial priority areas to include in the volumes: substance abuse assessment, psychosocial interventions, and pharmacotherapies. Each training volume consists of individual modules that focus on — for example — a different substance, treatment method, or aspect of treatment (e.g., detoxification, assessment, treatment planning, substitution therapy). These volumes are designed to train service providers in a “Training of Trainers” method. The first people trained will subsequently train a second generation of service providers in their own region.

The training volumes were presented at an international Network-wide meeting in September 2006 in Cairo, Egypt. After this launch of the training package, ISAP, with the assistance of substance abuse experts from many institutions, will use the volumes to train Network member trainers in an intensive training to take place at sites in Los Angeles, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

Starting in 2007, these Network-trained trainers will, in turn, disseminate their new skills and knowledge to all types of substance abuse service providers (nurses, doctors, counselors, social workers), who will then use the capacity building training volumes to build substance abuse treatment capacity within their regions.