The Alcohol Treatment Matrix is concerned with the treatment of alcohol-related problems among adults (another deals with drug-related problems). It maps the treatment universe and for each sub-territory (a cell) lists the most important UK-relevant research and guidance. Across the top, columns move from specific interventions through how their impacts are affected by the widening contexts of practitioners, management, the organisation, and whole local area treatment systems. Down the rows are the major intervention types implemented at these levels. Inside each cell is our pick of the most important documents relevant to the impact of that intervention type at that contextual level. 

What is this cell about? As well as concrete things like staff, management committees, resources, and an institutional structure, organisations have histories, values, priorities, an ethos, and links with other organisations, determining whether they offer an environment in which staff and patients/clients can maximise their potential. For these and other reasons, agencies also differ in how keenly and effectively they seek and incorporate evidence-based practices. This cell is specifically about the role organisational contexts play in treatment organised and/or funded by criminal justice and other authorities which offer or impose treatment, not because it has been sought by the patient, but because it could cut crime or otherwise benefit the community. Compared to research on interventions, organisational-level research is scarce and rarely of the gold-standard, randomised controlled trial format. Instead, researchers usually look for patterns in what naturally happens rather than manipulating it to test the consequences. Those patterns may be due the presumed cause and effect mechanisms, but may instead be due to unmeasured influences which the analysts cannot take into account. By ensuring any such influences are equalised across the focal intervention and the comparator against which it is being benchmarked, randomisation is intended to prevent them obscuring the effect of the intervention. In the absence of randomisation or an equivalent procedure, these influences remain in play, making it difficult to draw conclusions from the findings of a study.

From the relatively few documents listed in this cell, you will see that organisational research is particularly lacking on alcohol treatment intended to safeguard the community. In the expectation that organisational influences in these settings may not differ too much from those elsewhere, we can also refer you back to cells dealing with these influences in respect of brief interventions, generically across treatment, medical treatments, and psychosocial therapies.