Last week, AFEW-Ukraine held a training in Tbilisi, Georgia, on additional techniques for the case management of drug users.

In Georgia, our partners in the project “Bridging the Gaps: Health and Rights for Key Populations” are the Bemoni Public Union and Tanadgoma – Center for Information and Counseling on Reproductive Health. As part of the project, they work with drug users in social bureaus in Telavi, Kakheti, and Tbilisi. And case management for them is a daily practice.

The staff of the Bridging the Gaps project and the staff from other projects who work with drug users took part in the training. The purpose of this training was to create conditions for the development of skills of the new techniques use in the daily practice of case management. The trainer was Arseny Pavlovskiy, master of social work, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist from Riga, Latvia.

“It is especially important to use collaborative approaches with drug users, as they often face with marginalisation and oppression. And these approaches make it possible to work with the consequences of oppression and do not allow them to be reproduced”, Arseny says.

During the training, there was the talk of the difference in case management, counselling and medical assistance, participants learned to assess the situation and make a service plan, discussed the client’s support in implementing such plan, repeated the old ones and learned new techniques. Arseny also talked about the prevention of kickbacks and disruptions in the process of case management and about the conducting of the final evaluation. And our participants learned about written practices in social accompaniment and had a lot of practice.

For us, as for the organisers, it was important that the trainer was a practitioner with many years of experience and high qualifications, and participants were able to learn new and applied information, and immediately tried, debated and shared experiences.