How do you keep clients engaged in addiction treatment, so they complete the program?
What You Need to Know About AMA/APA Block training
I just spent the past two weeks traveling around the country teaching a class called AMA/APA block training for addiction treatment center staff. I trained three different treatment centers in California, one in Kentucky and one in Indiana, on how to keep people in treatment for a longer period of time. The problem with treatment centers is there is a 95% failure rate because people get irritable, restless, discontent, and leave early without actually finishing the medical and clinical programming.
Many treatment centers are not trained and equipped on how to try to keep them engaged into treatment and it causes a crisis within the milieu when somebody wants to leave. Counselors, therapists, behavioral health tech staff, and even the director of operations end up blocking the client from leaving and then end up blocking multiple clients from leaving, because they always want to leave in pairs. When this happens, it causes a disruption and causes all of the staff to stop their daily activities and duties and run to the client that wants to leave. Groups get missed, paperwork does not get done, and individual sessions get cancelled. I created this class specifically to help the staff understand terminology, tips and tricks to block the client from leaving without causing a disruption within the normal programming, while retaining the client for a longer period of time.
Since there was nothing available for training, we are the only provider of the AMA/APA block training class in the world. I have personally trained over 350 treatment centers in the past 10 years, utilizing these techniques on how to intervene correctly efficiently and easily before the client wants to leave. The key is to understanding what the issues are within the treatment center and moving certain small things around and utilizing different talking techniques and body language to understand where the client is coming from, what the issues are, and how to stop them before they get out of hand.
Here are a few tips from my training:
Tip One: Take the mood temperature of the clients on a daily basis. If you know where everyone is at mood-wise you will know what their behavior will be. We know that a feeling leads to a thought, leads to an action. If you know what the clients are feeling and thinking, and you can get a handle on that on a daily basis, you drop your AMA/APA rate significantly. This class has many different components that will teach the clinical staff, the behavioral health tech staff, and any of your leadership team, on how to provide these tools before the client decides they want to leave.
Tip Two: Use strategic open-ended questions. We tend to give directives like ‘go to group’ or ‘you need to stay because the consequences are dire”, but this doesn’t work. You need to use the 6 open ended questions to elicit real thought and change. We cover these in class.
Tip Three: Engaging groups. The amount of groups that clients encounter that are boring, antiquated and simply talk or visual is astounding. You need to engage all the senses in a group to keep clients interested and plugged in.
Tip Four: Validate your clients. Many clients feel herded like sheep from activity to activity. You need to validate their thoughts and feelings to elicit real change and completion of the treatment protocols.
Professional Value of our APA/AMA Block Training
• Learning the Proper Language to use to end the AMA/APA.
• How to build rapport with the client before during and after the intervention process.
• How to refer out and build referrals with partner Centers.
• Key Questions to ask the person to stop the AMA/APA.
• Increase Return on Investment (ROI).
• Handling the angry and obstinate client.
• Proper use of Assessment Tools.
• Service Coordination for Client Retainment.
• Objections 101.
• Reducing the AMA and APA Rate from the beginning, not just in crisis.
• Overcoming Objections to Treatment.
• Dealing with the desire to ‘just get high”.
• Handling guilt, remorse, and self-sabotaging behaviors.
• Body Language Techniques/NLP
• Stages of change
• Active vs. Passive Listening Skills
More on the class can be found HERE and you can call us at 1.800.706.0318 ext 2 to book your treatment center today.
Reviews on the class HERE
