Making Gambling Harm Treatment Accessible to Everyone
Treatment for gambling harms is not evenly available to all people in all countries, and sadly, it does not exist at all in some countries. In the developed countries where it does exist, such as the United States, Canada, and the UK, there are vastly different systems in place to ensure that people can access qualified treatment services for gambling harms.
Global Inequality and Access Challenges
So, that gives us a bit of a conundrum because we know that many people who are in all of these systems are negatively impacted by the mental health challenges that can arise from gambling issues. However, if there is no treatment system available or no highly qualified specialists who can interact with those people, we have a problem.
The Power of Secondary Prevention: Early Intervention for Gambling Harms
One of the most impactful solutions, in my opinion, is to focus on secondary prevention. This means tailoring efforts to interact with people in high-risk settings for certain types of addictions or mental health problems. For instance, embedding someone with insight and skills to help people make decisions about gambling in a credit counselling agency is an excellent way to intervene early without providing treatment.
Embedding Intervention Strategies in Existing Services
So my answer about how to make sure treatment is available to everyone regardless of region, class, status, or ethnic variables is to embed intervention, i.e., prevention strategies in places where people who are already experiencing types of harms that go along with gambling harms are. These are places where people are treated for depression, where people interact with the law around family violence or money crimes, or where people face employment or vocational issues because their gambling has affected their mental health. If you go to those places where services already exist and embed some early intervention to protect people around gambling, you can avoid the whole treatment question altogether.
Learn more about Focal Research's Safer Gambling Solutions
ALeRT is a data-driven real-world solution to help prevent gambling risk and harm.
The system integrates corporate social responsibility best practices and technologies across a modern enterprise, helping move operators into an active prevention role. It does this by identifying at-risk players, supporting effective customer interactions, and evaluating the impact of such interactions in reducing customer risk and harm.
The ALeRT BETTOR Customer Care Training program is intended as an ancillary resource for gambling operators to use in addition to their own policies, practices and staff training.
This training program provides service staff with additional information and skill sets for undertaking effective customer interactions as part of normal customer care. This in turn helps gamblers make better decisions, making gambling safer for all those choosing to gamble.
Our Healthy Bottom Line brochures are helpful guides that provide insight into gambling risk, and harm and provide professional encouragement to safeguard your patrons from risky play patterns that may develop into long-term issues.
With six different brochures, each brochure is customized and branded for each operator to provide information that is relevant and meaningful to their customers. Materials are available in both print and digital formats.
