Stacey Skilton – I am a…

WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO WORK IN THIS FIELD?
I began my career working in custody as a prison officer but felt that the role wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to be able to help people more. In the alcohol and drug field I’ve worked in various different roles – recovery worker, criminal justice recovery worker, and then I moved up to team leader, operations manager, service manager, and head of service. I felt I had something to give to communities, and I had a skill set that would be useful to help people through their recovery journeys. The more I learned about the field, the more my knowledge grew – and the more my interest grew, the more I wanted to do.

I never sat as a little girl thinking, ‘I want to manage a drug and alcohol service’. In fact, I never would have wanted a managerial role. But I had a lot of visible results and could see people in my communities that I supported. So when opportunities arose I thought, ‘If I can manage a service or a team, I can influence more people and help more people become well’. WithYou trusts that its heads of services can run them and make a change.

WHAT DOES A TYPICAL DAY LOOK LIKE?
I cover the full Redcar and Cleveland area. We have numerous hubs covering towns, seaside areas, and rural areas, and I tend to float between the hubs I’m in. I like to spend time with my staff and understand the problems they’ve got, because I can’t support them when they raise their concerns if I don’t understand. On a Friday I tend to keep my diary as light as possible, and the staff will come and have a chat. They’ll ask me for updates, give me ideas, and tell me about client concerns. I like to think that I’m still very much linked to the frontline of the service.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR WORK ENVIRONMENT
A lot of our work includes our partnership service THRIVE, which consists of Harbour (a domestic abuse service), Intuitive Thinking Skills (who provide substance use related educational opportunities), and different elements of the local authority. A big part of my role is representing WithYou to our various partners. I get to influence other local projects and continue to promote our service – challenging the bias and stigma that still exists – and push for wider system change outside of the WithYou world. I enjoy that element.

Working in partnership means we’re in a really good position to be able to challenge each other as stakeholders and better meet the needs of the community, because although WithYou is drugs and alcohol at our core, we are so much more than that.

Recently one of my staff did a home visit to a client that she had huge concerns about because she hadn’t heard from him. He didn’t answer the door so she went to the neighbour, who let her in. It turned out that our client hadn’t been in touch because he had no money and his electricity had been turned off. He was sat in the cold and dark and because he didn’t have money, he couldn’t use his phone. My staff member called the utility company, explained what had happened and got his utilities turned back on.

We do so much more behind the scenes, and that needs to continue to evolve and grow, because people genuinely are in crisis and they don’t know where to go. I think sometimes that we as a service hold that key to reaching out to people.

WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST REWARDING?
I really like to be able to support staff ideas and the changes they want. A recovery worker once said to me, ‘If we sit still, the world will keep turning around us.’ It’s for us to get up and move with that world. I want to foster an environment where people come to me with ideas and say, ‘I think this is needed. Can I do this?’

A staff member came to me and said, ‘Can I swap my caseload round and just have opiates? Because I’m really enjoying working with them.’ If that’s your passion, your interest, go for it. It’s nice to be able to support people in that capacity, because if you make your staff happy, you retain your staff – and if you retain your staff, there’s better relationships with clients and better outcomes. From December ’22 to December ’23 we didn’t lose any members of staff in Redcar. In December ’23 we had staff leave, but those staff members came back to us within eight months and one of them said that returning had been like coming home. I have some incredible staff with amazing stories and loads of skills to give, and I’m in a position to support that.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHANGE?
I’d like to change the conversation around drug and alcohol support – for people you pass on the street, shop workers, bus drivers, people who sometimes find it easy to judge the clients who we’re supporting.

Most people have a story about someone they know who died from alcohol, or someone who used too many prescription drugs after an operation. But for some reason, the disparity between everyday conversation and the conversation about our client group is quite vast. There’s a big gap there, and I’d love to be able to bring it closer together.

I also want to continue developing the service to intervene and reach out to people before they need our help – before they fall into the river and need pulling out. Our young people’s service attends schools and colleges and speaks to children as young as nine and ten about healthy relationships and substance use, in an age-appropriate manner. If we educate young people, they’ll be able to tell their parents/carers and other children, and as they’re teaching and spreading the word, they’re retaining the information more, and it’s going to have more of an impact on them later in life.

They may still go on to try a substance, but if they’re aware of the risk, it might only be a try and not become a dependence. They might then know how to keep their mum and dad safe if they find tablets, and if their friends or other teenagers get into trouble with alcohol they’ll know to phone 999. If we’re not having the conversations and not giving them the knowledge, we’re not giving them the opportunity to use it. And I do think that as drug and alcohol service, we have to be accountable for that harm reduction within our community. It’s our responsibility.