An evaluation design of an adolescent drug abuse treatment unit

The purpose of this paper was to design an evaluative study of the effectiveness of the adolescent inpatient unit at St. Joseph's Hospital. This unit, known as the Program for Adolescent Development (PAD), treats primarily drug abusers. A review of the literature disclosed five main treatment approaches presently in existence. However, it was void of research done on adolescent treatment and proved quite chaotic. Rarely could results from one study be compared to results from another due to a lack of mutual standards. Some standards were suggested, however, for future research the most important being to base "recovery" on three years of abstinence from drugs plus evidence of social adjustment. It seemed also very important that programs submit themselves for evaluation so that others wanting to start a program would have a basis for deciding what types of treatment to include. It was recommended that St. Joseph's evaluate their drug program and a design was constructed for that purpose. This design hoped to accomplish the following goals: 1) to evaluate the PAD program, 2) to collect data for comparison with other programs, 3) to provide an objective basis for making changes, and 4) to be able to generalize the results to other hospitals or situations where adolescent programs are going on. Ideally others who wish to construct a program could use St. Joseph's as a model and subsequently be able to evaluate their program.