Evaluation of the programme and future recommendations (2005)

ENGLISH :
This special issue has shown some examples of (sometimes preliminary) results of research projects in the Dutch Addiction Programme. Since the addiction programme has stimulated about 88 projects in the past 6 years, the seven projects presented in this special issue can give no more than an interesting impression of what the programme has brought about. Since most of the projects have not finished yet, the majority of the results are expected in about 4 years. However, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports and the Ministry of Education, who commissioned the programme, were very interested to see the results the programme had achieved in the past 6 years. Therefore an evaluation was carried out in the phase of the programme in the past year. This evaluation had to provide an answer to the question to what extent the programme already has succeeded in reaching its goals. An external committee of Dutch experts (from the fields of public health, addiction and mental health) has reported on the extent to which the programme goals were reached, where results were limited and how to proceed in the future. The external committee based its judgement on an internal evaluation document (Van de Goor & Van Zantvoort, 2003) on the one hand and on interviews with experts in the Dutch addiction field on the other hand. The main aim of the programme was formulated as follows: to increase (by granting projects in research and development) scientific knowledge and to stimulate quality and innovation of addiction care, prevention and monitoring (Van de Goor & Van Zantvoort, 2003). In order to reach this aim, collaboration between fundamental and applied research (nationally and internationally), as well as between research and practice in addiction care and prevention, should increase. Furthermore, the client perspective should become more integrated in research, and implementation of research results should be improved. To present some insight in the impact the addiction programme has had until now, the main evaluation results are highlighted here (based on a report by Casselman, Rooijmans & Sturmans, 2004).