Today we would like to share with you a video from our annual ATCPCC 2013, Addiction Treatment Centers and Professional Consortium. Here in our guest lecture video series is Mr. John Southworth with Southworth Associates. He shares with us his knowledge of Case Management for Professionals. We have a transcript of the lecture for you to follow:
Hi. I’m John Southworth, and I own Southworth Associates. My parent company is Southworth International, which is the S Corporation, and under it I’ve got all five different corporations, all LLC’s, but Southworth Associates operates in the United States. And our main function is interventions. We do a lot of case management and monitoring, and we do a lot of conferences, and we do a lot of training for interventions. So we’re quite busy.
The thing I’d like to talk about today is case management and the word gets kicked around a lot, but we’ve been doing it for 21 years and we’re completely computerized. We’re the largest, the oldest one, but I want to tell you a little history on this, and, if I could, is how I developed this – and we developed this – is I saw the recipe for recovery, and I just loved it. And it was with doctors and anybody with a license, and it was working. I thought I was so good because I was getting these great outcomes and I’m so excited about it and I know everything about this disease now and early detection and get them into treatment and monitor them at least five years. And that was if you had a license. That’s like having a gun at somebody’s head because if you’ve got an airline pilot or a doctor, that’s pretty easy to do.
So I took this recipe, put it over here on Joe Blow, and it wasn’t working. And people were paying this money to me, and they said, well, it’s not working properly. And I thought, what is it? So it was – the part about monitoring is pretty simple. If you’ve got a license, you can just do what we call Level 1 Monitoring, and that’s check the urines, check the AA meetings, anything on the discharge summary. That’s pretty easy, but where you don’t have a license, we had to go to what we call Level 2.
So my staff did an intervention on me and they said, you’re selling something you can’t back up, and I said, what am I doing wrong? They said, well, you’re outselling yourself. I said, well, what’s it going to take? They said, we need a piece of software. What I had to do was to take that concept and stop for a year, build the software, spend a lot of money on it, but I had to get the family involved to where I’m – if you follow me, I’m doing a real good job. I’m watching the person come out of treatment, making them accountable, but I didn’t have anybody to back it up unless I had a license.
So what I did with the family is we gave the assignments. They got weekly assignments. They signed the contract, and after the intervention training and the intervention, we hold them accountable so that they’re being monitored, also. They’re going to Al Anon. They got to go to co-dependency treatment, love addiction, whatever it takes for the family because if you take a leper out of a colony and put them in treatment and put them back in the leper colony and say, don’t catch leprosy, that’s insane. That’s what families have been doing for years. They think they’re going to send somebody away and they’re going to be fixed or cured. There’s no cure, and the disease progresses at a rapid rate.
And so by designing this piece of software, our staff — which we’ve got a beautiful staff — they make everybody accountable. We make everybody sign the contract. It’s like kind of holding hands and having this wild horse inside this corral and we want to saddle it. We all hold hands, and y’all are accountable. We’ll get that horse to finally settle down, and we can get his saddle. That’s what the concept’s about, and it’s been so much fun because a lot of people, well, we don’t want to do – and I said, how about your husband or your son or whoever, your brother. They don’t want to do this or that, and now you don’t? Why’d you hire me?
So the whole thing, if it’s a child, a younger person, of a family, then I find that we have to fire the family, if you’ll let me say that. We have to fire the family and have them just do their work in co-dependency and my software, be accountable with my staff, go to your Al Anon meetings. Just let them get well. In the meantime, we’ll take care of their loved one, and it works. So now our results we have coming out where we can beat – or be the same, at least – as airline pilots and doctors, but I missed the whole thing. I felt bad about it, that we missed the whole thing. It was accountability. So now I know that’s the main thing, and it’s a tough sale sometimes because a lot of families just want you to fix their loved one and they’ll be home waiting for them. It doesn’t work. That’s like we’re going to take them in and baptize them or something, bring them home as a new church member. Doesn’t work.
So my goal in this whole – on this planet – on my tombstone, you can put “I tried.” That’s all I care about, but I want earlier detection, like cancer, earlier signs. There are cancer people 30 years ahead of us, early detection. Get them in for a real good thorough evaluation. Get them into long-term treatment where possible, and monitor and just like cancer, a minimum of five years would be appropriate. If we can only do one or two or whatever, that’s a start, but the main thing is if I can get your loved one into a five-year recovery program, I’ll give you a pretty darned good product and a good diagnosis for recovery.
I want you to know in closing that we are available 24/7. The only time I won’t answer immediately is if I’m in the air. We do this internationally, and we’ve got people on standby. We really cover this well, but if you do need the help or referral, something, you’re desperate, whatever, don’t give up. You don’t give up on cancer. You don’t give up on diabetes. You don’t give up on this disease, either. Please call us at 800-386-1695. That’s 1-800-386-1695 or my cell. It’s a toll free, too. I’ve got a toll free number for those knot head kids that when they’re shooting drugs in South Philly and they run out of money, at least they can call me, and that’s 866-460-9014. If you want to look at our website, it’s Southworth Associates, plural, spell it out, Southworth Associates, one word, dot net. There’s a video on there. There’s a lot of good information, or call me personally. I’ll answer your calls. Thank you.
