What are rehab facilities ?
A rehab/treatment center is most likely to be a residential inpatient facility, although there are rehabs that simply deal with daycare patients.
A residential inpatient facility must have a number of specific areas of expertise, both in terms of facilities and staff in order to have a reasonable chance of helping someone to recover from alcoholism.
A rehab/treatment center will need to ensure that someone arriving and ready to be admitted to the rehab is in a safe physical condition to do so.
This means that the rehab needs to either have its own in-house detox facilities, or immediate access to detox facilities at a local hospital.
It is very often the case that someone arriving for admission to a rehab will have been continually drinking or taking drugs up until the point of entry.
It is absolutely essential to their health, that they are medically supervised in a safe environment whilst they are being detoxified.
This means simply being clinically supervised whilst undergoing in a safe way the withdrawal effects that may happen at the result of tapering off alcohol and/or drugs over a period of time.
A rehab/treatment center must have a number of qualified medical staff, both doctors and nurses, as well as other clinicians such as a pharmacist, nutritionist, chiropractor and also a significant number of qualified therapists or councillors.
It is quite likely that a rehab/treatment center comes under some type of state legislation as to the level of medical personnel it needs to employ, so this is unlikely to be an issue from a point of view of safety of the patient.
A rehab/treatment center should have a number of qualified therapists and counsellors available to look after the inpatients during their stay.
Much of the work that the in-patient will do in a rehab/treatment center will be of a therapeutic nature, and there is a need for a good staff patient ratio in order for inpatients to be able to get the most benefit from this type of treatment.
Because of the length of stay of most patients, the nature of the therapeutic work is going to be short-term. It is not going to be long-term therapy.
However it may be that some of the work done in a rehab/treatment center leads the patient to seek longer term therapy once discharged. Having said that, there is likely to be a significant amount of one-to-one work of a therapeutic nature done in a rehab/treatment center.
There is also likely to be a significant amount of group therapy work, much of which will be facilitated by trained counsellors and therapists.
A rehab/treatment center will be aware that many people when choosing where to go for treatment will look at the various facilities offered. It would be easy to assume that many rehabs have similar facilities to high-class country clubs or hotels.
It is a strange irony that a rehab/treatment center may well have outstanding facilities and accommodation, whilst at the same time having a fairly strict regimen and timetabling of work that seems somewhat oppressive to many people.
A rehab/treatment center, aside from its physical location, will also seek to offer much by way of different types of therapy that will enhance people’s general well-being.
Rehab is likely to offer things such as yoga, Chi Gong, mindfulness and meditation training, a gym or other types of physical activity.
A rehab/treatment center will realise that helping people get well physically is an important part of their recovery generally, and this will be scheduled into someone’s personalised programme of treatment recovery.
A rehab/treatment center that is really well focused will also consider issues concerning discharge from the moment of admission. A rehab can easily become a bit of a bubble, indeed that is part of the attraction.
The danger with that is that when leaving it is difficult to reintegrate into so-called normal life from the effect of the bubble.
For this reason a rehab will try to balance these two factors, making clear that whilst the patient is in the rehab, it is a safe place where they can address their issues and hopefully move on.
At the same time a rehab will prepare someone for when they leave and have to return to life before rehab, at a practical level normally meaning family and work.
Family issues are a huge part of someone’s program of recovery in treatment and need to be dealt with very delicately.
For most people entering rehab, the family is an integral part of their alcoholism, and how the patient reintegrate with the family once sober and out of treatment someday at least be carefully planned and worked at.
A rehab should encourage families to investigate fellowships such as Al-Anon, and make use of the program they offer as a way of healing fractured relationships.