The Therapeutic Workplace is an efficacious, computerized treatment designed to address the chronic, persistent nature of drug addiction and unemployment by integrating abstinence reinforcement contingencies of proven efficacy into a business setting using salary for work to reinforce drug abstinence. Under this intervention, chronically unemployed adults with long histories of drug addiction are hired and paid to work in an income-producing business. To link salary to abstinence, participants are required to provide drug-free urine samples to maintain daily access to the workplace. In this way, participants can work and earn salary, but only as long as they remain abstinent. Several randomized, controlled trials of a data entry business incorporating Therapeutic Workplace procedures and principles demonstrated that the treatment was efficacious. Using the Therapeutic Workplace in a data entry business is a very specific application of the intervention, but the principles and procedures could be adapted for the treatment of other substance abuse problems, such as alcoholism, or for use in new or existing community businesses that are willing to hire adults with substance abuse histories, or by existing businesses looking for a means to address the substance abuse problems of their current employees. It is through these novel applications that the Therapeutic Workplace may have significant commercial viability and gain widespread acceptance. For the Therapeutic Workplace intervention to be attractive to a wide range of businesses deployment and administration costs and complexity must be reduced and the application must be generalized to accommodate workflows besides that of the data entry business. To accomplish these goals RTC proposes the following innovative solutions: 1) Reduce the deployment and administration costs of the Therapeutic Workplace by encapsulating all the procedures and processes needed to implement the intervention in a low-cost, hardware device that RTC will remotely administer. This device, or server appliance as it will be called, will be reliable, easy to deploy and will not require a dedicated Information Technology professional to administer it; 2) Generalize the Therapeutic Workplace software so it can be used in a wide range of new or existing businesses beyond data entry. RTC will accomplish this by modifying the software to allow a treatment provider to customize the Workplace software to fit their business processes. Upon achieving these goals, treatment providers, whether they are community-based businesses started specifically as Therapeutic Workplaces or existing businesses looking for efficacious and cost-effective ways to treat employees with substance abuse problems, will have access to the resources and support needed to implement the intervention in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Thesaurus Terms: computer assisted instruction, curriculum, drug abuse education, drug abuse therapy, drug addiction, educational resource design /development, occupational therapy, therapy design /development drug abuse prevention, education evaluation /planning, employment /unemployment
