Two practitioners

If two practitioners deliver the same recovery programme in substantially different ways, is that a workforce problem or a programme problem?

I think about Denis every time I'm asked this question.

He went through the same programme twice. Same charity. Same purple folder of worksheets everyone got handed on day one. Different counsellor the second time around.

The first counsellor stuck firmly to the session plan. Session plan one then worksheet one, then session plan two then worksheet two and so on. When Denis mentioned in session two that the gambling had started the week his dad died, the counsellor nodded. Wrote something down. Moved the conversation back to the coping strategies handout. Denis dropped out at week three.

The second counsellor put the folder on the table when the same story was brought up and said, "tell me what happened." Denis talked about his dad for forty minutes. The worksheets got done eventually, just out of order and behind schedule. He completed the programme. He's been a peer support worker in gambling harm services for six years now.

People ask me to pick a side in this argument. I never can, not cleanly, and Denis is part of why. He isn't a story about one good counsellor and one careless one. He's a story about a programme that trusted its content more than it trusted its people to know when to put the content down.

Good programmes give practitioners scaffolding. Great ones also give them permission, and that permission never makes it into the manual or the compliance checklist. It's exactly the part that decided whether Denis saw the programme through and actually got something from it.

Train the “what” all you like. If nobody ever teaches the judgment of when to depart from it, you haven't built a workforce problem. You've built a programme with a hole in it shaped like trust.