Recovery Practitioner – The Role and its Responsibilities

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Uncategorized Jan 27, 2020 0

Recovery Recruitment works with a range of employers across the addiction treatment sector and has regular vacancies for Recovery Practitioners. We work closely with the larger community based addiction rehabilitation services, prisons and smaller treatment providers. What nobody argues with is that the recovery practitioner is the backbone of an effective addiction treatment service.

Recovery practitioners (also known as substance misuse workers or drug and alcohol workers) help people recover from entrenched addictions to alcohol, drugs or addictive behaviours such as gambling or food issues.

So, what do you need to become a recovery practitioner? The good news is that there are no formal entry requirements. You could come into this work from a variety of backgrounds, like nursing, criminal justice, social care, youth work or counselling. For example, you may have dealt with drug or alcohol-dependent patients as a nurse, or worked in the probation service, supporting people after their release from prison.

However, you don’t need to have any of this on your CV. If you have direct experience of addiction or dependency, you’ll almost certainly have a clear idea of the issues your future clients will be facing.

We looked at commonalities in our recovery practitioner vacancies and talked to some of our experienced candidates, many with lived experience of addiction, about their daily duties and responsibilities.

The Recovery Practitioner position offers you an opportunity to experience a wide variety of responsibilities. They could include:

  • Counselling and rehabilitation – giving support and dealing with the causes of substance misuse
  • Prison based addiction work – counselling, assessment, referral, advice in prisons and remand centres, including support with detox programmes
  • Outreach work – visiting people with substance misuse issues and helping with immediate needs, such as temporary accommodation
  • Drop-in centre work – talking to clients about their needs and finding ways of supporting them towards recovery from addiction
  • Supporting clients arrested for offences associated to their addiction
  • Education and training – helping clients in early recovery from addiction access services to help them with reading, writing, maths, computer and job-search skills
  • Advocacy – helping clients with a history of addiction to use housing, employment and healthcare services
  • Needle exchange – giving advice to people with addiction issues on how to use substances safely and reduce harm to themselves and to society
  • Youth work – giving emotional support and help with education, employment and training to people in recovery from addiction

As a recovery practitioner you’ll need to have strong interpersonal skills, be a strong empathetic communicator, be patient and to be a genuine team player –  you’ll also need to pass an enhanced background check.

If you’re interested in learning more about recovery practitioner vacancies, visit our Jobs Dashboard

If you’re an employer, we’d love to hear from you to talk through what tops your list of skills needed by the very best recovery practitioner. Contact us here or call 0203 784 4471 for a chat about how we can deliver candidates who perfectly match your organisational needs and ethos.

We’d love to hear your comments on how Recovery Practitioners working in your organisations help improve service users’ lives and add value to the organisations they work for. What’s your own experience of working as a Recovery Practitioner?

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