We work towards a continuous cycle of improvement to enhance provision across all of our service settings. We adopt an 'action-research' approach; an agile way of working that is carefully integrated into our services at regular intervals.
Action-research ensures that services are shaped by a range of research methods (user, staff and partner feedback, assessment findings, evaluations and reviews) to ensure services flexibly meet the changing needs and expectations of our commissioners, and ultimately, our service users.
Ethical considerations provide a set of principles that guide our research designs and practices. At Forward, we always adhere to a robust code of conduct when collecting data from individuals and/or groups that use our services.
The goals of human research often includes understanding real-life phenomena, studying effective treatments, investigating behaviours, and improving lives in other ways.
Forward’s strategy on what to research - and how to conduct that research – involves three important ethical considerations, which are designed to:
Protect the rights of research participants.
Enhance research validity.
Maintain scientific or academic integrity.
Our research is structured around three core areas:
We contribute to a new academic understanding of our key work areas across substance use, criminal justice, employment, recovery, family, and housing support through our action-research, service data analysis, and impact studies. This supports wider societal understanding of topics, such as health inequalities and criminal justice reform.
Our research is able to challenge existing (and often outdated) perceptions around addiction, criminality, and childhood trauma. We use our evidence-based findings to make policy recommendations and share our knowledge through our evergreen campaigns Taking Action on Addiction and More Than My Past.
We incorporate findings from our routine service evaluations at regular intervals throughout the year. We do this to enhance the quality of our support services, interventions and programmes. Service user feedback is reviewed alongside clinical quality reviews in various ways and is regularly discussed with service delivery teams to ensure we are taking a holistic approach to feedback. This multi-layered approach is integral to our robust service delivery and ensures we actively consider the wider service user experience.
With over 30 years of research experience, we have established strong partnerships with academic institutions and other research organisations across a range of service sectors. Our work also enables us to work with commercial partners and like-minded organisations that share our corporate values. All partnership work is conducted to the highest ethical standards, sharing data that has been consented, anonymised or in adherence to Data Protection and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legal frameworks.
We rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of our interventions and programmes using an evidence-based approach. This agile way of monitoring our service delivery means that we are able to adapt quickly and make swift changes if we find a decreasing impact or effectiveness that can be improved.
Evaluations of structured programmes involve service user evaluation at different stages and the use of psychometric measures to predict and evidence longer term sustainable behaviour change. This enables us to capture service user improvement at different points of the support journey and to measure whether structured programmes are meeting their aims.
Knowledge-sharing of key findings and learnings across programme delivery teams ensures continuous improvement.
Forward are leaders in effective intervention design within substance use, addiction, mental health, and family support. Research feeds directly into intervention design, ensuring client care is responsive, trauma-informed, up-to-date, and aligned with evidence and best practice.
We continuously develop and refine interventions and service models based on evaluation findings, as well as service user and staff feedback.
Balancing research and real-world impact: Unlike traditional research-based academic institutions that focus on long-term research, The Forward Trust is uniquely positioned to utilise expertise from experienced research professionals and apply recommendations to real life settings quickly and effectively.
Ethical Foundations: From initiation to completion, our research is informed by Patient and Public Involvement (PPI). PPI is a gold standard approach to research practices in the UK. This close adherence to PPI principles ensures that those who might benefit from research findings are involved at every stage of research project planning and ongoing development.
Harm reduction and abstinence-based approaches: Our interventions recognise the full spectrum of recovery based on a strong foundation of harm minimisation. For service users, this means that we support individuals ‘where they are at’. Our ultimate goal is to save lives – this is why we chose to work with all individuals, without judgment, to ensure they receive the right treatment when it’s needed and most effective.
Personalised and flexible approach: Our research has identified that the individuals we support often lead diverse and complex lives with varying personal histories and circumstances. This means we do not adopt a strict ‘one size fits all’ approach and instead work hard to tailor and accommodate individual needs to ensure their long-term recovery. We understand how factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, neurodiversity, health, housing, employment, and family relationships can all play a significant role in how people engage with our services.
Collaborate, innovate and co-design with The Forward Trust
We are keen to work in partnership with like-minded organisations to improve services and outcomes in substance use, mental health, addiction, housing, employment, family support and criminal justice rehabilitation.
Whether you’re a commercial business, academic institution, charity, health agency, or social enterprise, we’d be delighted to hear from you.
Forward adds significant value and insight for a number of collaborative opportunities – e.g. academic research, digital literacy and inclusion, employment schemes, and campaign partnerships.
If you would like to explore the opportunities of working with Forward please get in touch.
