Contingency Management: Effectiveness, Tips, and Risks


contingency management examples

However, the idea of giving cash to patients who are receiving drug abuse treatment is not without controversy. In some cases, practitioners worry that their patients will make superficial and temporary changes rather than sincere, long-lasting ones. Contingency management (CM) is one of the most enduring approaches to behavior modification. Despite the benefits, CM remains an underutilized behavioral treatment for several reasons.

contingency management examples

How Does Contingency Management Differ from Other Therapy Approaches in Substance Abuse Treatment?

However, among youth not entirely abstinent from alcohol, those receiving CM reported fewer alcohol use days during the 36 weeks after the end of treatment than those not receiving CM. Among youth who also used cannabis at baseline, results showed similar benefits of CM on cannabis use days. FHE Health is a behavioral health and addiction treatment center with a strong focus on evidence-based therapies and a step-down continuum of care. As clients grow stable and more confident in their ability to manage their addiction, they transition to less structured treatment programs.

Family and Children’s Programs

contingency management examples

In health clinics where it was used, CM was largely successful in getting people to quit. Markets and industries are constantly shifting, so the reality that a contingency plan faces when it is triggered might be very different than the one it was created for. Plans should be tested at least once annually, and new risk assessments performed. Think of the supply chain problems and critical shortages wreaked by the pandemic or the chaos to global supply chains brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Conduct a business impact analysis

  1. Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response.
  2. Thus, based on the impact of each behavior over time, some contexts will serve to maintain the behavior (i.e., increase its frequency), whereas others may mitigate the behavior (i.e., decrease its frequency).
  3. Three other studies (Budney et al., 2000; Ledgerwood & Petry 2006; Litt, Kadden, Kabela-Cormier, & Petry 2008) found no differences over time on scores of readiness to change substance use between patients receiving CM and other forms of treatment.
  4. In addition, among youth with at least one negative urine drug test during treatment, those who received CM had significantly more weeks of continuous abstinence from cannabis than those who did not receive CM.
  5. If clients successfully accomplished these activities and provided objective verification of their completion via receipts (Petry et al., 2001b), they received rewards.

While these negative reinforcement techniques may be effective in altering some behaviors, they also result in an unpleasant environment and context for recovery. Many treatment programs routinely use some forms of reinforcement, such as take-home methadone privileges for patients who maintain long periods of abstinence or pins and leadership status in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Contingency management is a type of behavioural therapy that has shown moderate success. Under this scheme addicts are rewarded for maintaining abstinence by, for example, receiving shopping vouchers in return for drug-free urine samples (Higgins et al., 1991). Contingency management has been demonstrated to reduce drug use for cocaine (Petry et al., 2004), heroin (Silverman et al., 1996) and marijuana (Budney et al., 2000), at least in the short-term.

contingency management examples

For example, you should definitely create a contingency plan for a risk that’s high likelihood and high severity, whereas you probably don’t need to create a contingency plan for a risk that’s low likelihood and low severity. Once you outline risks and potential threats, work with your stakeholders to identify the potential impact of each risk. In the face of a global health crisis, a pandemic contingency plan is vital for organizations in healthcare, retail, and manufacturing. This plan focuses on mitigation strategies to minimize operational disruptions and ensure the safety of employees while maintaining business continuity. A business contingency plan is a specialized strategy that organizations develop to respond to particular, unforeseen events that threaten to disrupt regular operations. Let’s look at some examples to illustrate better why contingency plans are necessary and how businesses reacted.

What Is A Business Continuity Plan? [+ Template & Examples]

Typically, CM interventions are used as part of a comprehensive substance use treatment program including some form of individual or family-based intervention. It’s not a therapy unto itself but rather an evidence-based behavior modification intervention. While motivational incentives mixing alcohol and antidepressants can help individuals achieve their treatment goals, this method should be used in conjunction with another approach, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT can help a person address their thoughts and feelings, eventually phasing out unhealthy thought patterns.

Risk management is a proactive approach that companies use to prevent loss or disasters. So rather than being reactive like a contingency plan, a risk management plan looks to stop adverse events from happening in the first place. Contingency management is an effective behavior change technique commonly used to treat substance use disorders. All in all, contingency plans help you prepare for a host of what-if scenarios, whether they happen or not. As you never want to be caught in a challenging situation, being prepared is the best thing you can do to ensure your business continues to succeed, regardless of whatever happens along the way. The final step to creating your plan, maintaining and testing, is a continuous effort.

Research in residential treatment patients, methadone-maintained opiate-dependent patients, and in the Veteran’s Administration hospital population demonstrates that contingency management can reduce smoking and promote abstinence in this group. Results from a few small trials in individuals with schizophrenia are also promising. Application of this intervention to improve adherence with smoking cessation medications is another area of interest.

CM is a behavioral modification strategy (or a behavioral intervention) based on the concept of operant conditioning, which posits that humans will adjust their behavior to reap rewards or avoid punishment. Finally, it’s essential to monitor the implementation of the contingency plan and make adjustments as needed. This may involve revisiting your assessment of internal and external factors, updating your contingency strategies, or modifying roles and responsibilities. Regularly monitoring the plan is crucial to ensure it remains relevant and practical. It’s essential to provide training and development opportunities for employees so that they have the skills and knowledge they need to implement the contingency plan effectively.

Research has shown that treatment options based on contingency management principles are effective. CM entails offering patients awards, recognition, and sometimes monetary rewards to reinforce positive behavior changes like drug abstinence. There are certain rules you must follow and while the federal government provides ample guidance, it can be difficult to understand. But you don’t need to let legalese stand between you and CM as a strategy for treating patients. Most commonly, contingency management has been successfully used in smoking reduction programs for pregnant women who are receiving treatment for drug abuse and for pregnant women who are in treatment for alcohol or cocaine dependence. Contingency management for women can effectively utilize personal hygiene, household, or children’s items as “prizes” for attaining or sustaining abstinence, based on urine test results.

Your contingency plan might include who can cover certain projects or processes while you hire a backfill, or how to improve team documentation to prevent siloed skillsets. You might be familiar with contingency plans to respond to natural disasters—businesses and governments typically create contingency plans for disaster recovery after floods, earthquakes, or tornadoes. In clinics that adopt CM, 3 ways to stop taking wellbutrin training and supervision are paramount to ensure core aspects of CM are retained. Only about half of clinics providing CM arranged for in-house or off-site training (Olmstead, Abraham, Martino, & Roman 2012). Clinician skill in administering CM impacts patient outcomes (Hartzler, Beadnell, & Donovan 2017; Petry et al., 2012a), and supervision can maintain fidelity over time (Petry et al., 2012a,b).

Get their feedback on potential risks and other factors that may impact guidelines in the plan. Having executive support from the start ensures the plan put forth is approved and also can motivate those at the department level to buy-in as well. It may be helpful to have an example of a contingency plan, so we’ll go over one below.

This ensures that everyone knows what they are responsible for and can act quickly if the plan needs to be implemented. The functional environment for a particular person is often different from the functional environment of another person. Many stimuli or events that occur in a person’s environment do not have any effect on the person’s behavior.

Contingency planning can be a component of risk management since that process helps organizations survive these potential risks. For example, you may experience a significant increase in revenue during a specific period due to changes in market behavior. This is a good scenario, but you will still need to adapt your operations addiction as a coping mechanism and healthy alternatives to scale and appropriately meet the new demands of your growing audience. CM has also been tested for adolescents stepping down from residential substance use treatment.20 Youth receiving CM had more days of abstinence from cannabis through the 9-month post treatment follow up compared to usual continuing care.

Continuity is the ability of your business to continue functioning after an incident that has disrupted operations occurs. A contingency plan is an action plan that goes into place if an incident were to happen. Fact is, contingency management (CM) is a ho-hum name for a type of therapy that can produce exciting results—and has for decades. With this post, I will explain what it is, how it is best used, and why it deserves a more prominent place in the addiction treatment world.

A resident who passes a drug test or has a therapeutic breakthrough receives a gift card that triggers their brain’s reward system, encouraging them to progress further so they receive more gifts. Contingency management (CM) is the application of the three-term contingency (or operant conditioning), which uses stimulus control and consequences to change behavior. CM originally derived from the science of applied behavior analysis (ABA), but it is sometimes implemented from a cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) framework as well (such as in dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT). CM is an effective treatment for SUD because it’s based on behavioral therapy principles. Given the consequences of black swan events, effective risk management for such possibilities would seem essential. But businesses can’t prepare for every contingency and so are reluctant to invest now to protect against a future risk event of unknown impact.

Lott &Jencius14 foundthat reimbursement rates substantially increased when contingency managementwas introduced to adolescents who misused substances. One area in which contingency management has widespread potential benefitsis individual retention in treatment. Psychiatric treatments suffer from highrates of attrition, which in turn relates to increased morbidity andmortality. Substance misuse treatment clinics typically experience attritionrates of 80% or higher, and attrition is high in most other out-patient mentalhealth treatment as well.


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