Whether treatment is chosen positively or under pressure, we learnt from cell A4 that among the ‘common factors’ affecting its success is patients’ relationships with treatment practitioners. This cell explores research on the client-worker relationship, and on workers’ attributes which affect their clients’ progress, narrowing in on when treatment has been offered or imposed not because it has been sought by the client, but because it is thought that treating their substance use problems could reduce offending, protect their children, or otherwise benefit the community – some of the trickiest situations (see final section below) in which establish a productive rapport.

Across psychotherapy the interpersonal style and other features of staff are now seen as at least as important as the intervention, but remain far less commonly researched. In the expectation that the influences exerted by practitioners in these settings may not differ too much from those elsewhere, for more studies we can refer you back to the other cells dealing with practitioner influences: cell B1 for brief interventions, B2 for treatment in general, B3 for medical treatments, and cell B4 for psychosocial therapies.