Recovery Alliance Initiative: Proposed Principles and Stages of Care

Below is a document I’ve prepared at the request of the Recovery Alliance Initiative (RAI) leadership. It outlines some basic information that will be helpful for community-based leaders to better see the big picture of the RAI model, as it applies to helping the individual.

Recovery Alliance Initiative:  Proposed Principles and Stages of Care

Principle 1:  Community-based peer support personnel can be trained in both harm reduction (HR) models and recovery coach (RC) methods.  This would maximize their capabilities and flexibility.

Principle 2:   As substance use disorder (SUD) severity rises, complexity and chronicity of the disorder tends to increase.  For SUD moderate to severe, following the onset of sobriety, a 5-year model of care is best practice.

Principle 3:  Stages of care span: primary prevention, harm reduction, engagement/persuasion, stabilization, active treatment, relapse prevention, and recovery management. 

Principle 4:  Peer support personnel should have a working knowledge of each stage of care.

Principle 5:  Each stage of care can exist on a continuum from the more traditional model (TM) of evidence-based practices (more clinically derived) to the recovery model (RM) built on the BHRM project’s recovery management principles (more person-centered).   

Principle 6:  While the individual resides within any one stage of care, their peer support helper can address them with different methods (HR vs RC) on a per-problem basis, regardless of their general stage of care.