About the project
The 5-year long trial period of Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) started in January of 2022. It is an intense form of treatment where people with opioid use disorder meet up twice a day at a clinic to receive medical grade heroin. The target group is people with long-term opioid use who up until this point has not benefitted from traditional opioid substitutional treatment. The shift from daily use of illegal street heroin to receiving heroin as medicine brings with it a new set of labels, from "drug addict" to "patient".
The project seeks to investigate if being in heroin assisted treatment has an impact of the patients self-identity and sense of stigmatization, and how these mechanisms works from an institutional level. The project also aims to describe how the patients experience the treatment in general, and how it affects their everyday life.
Method
The project has an qualitative longitudinal design. 10 to 15 newly enrolled HAT patients will be recruited and interviewed separately at three separate instances over the course of 18 months. 10 to 15 staff members will also be interviewed over the same time span. Around 300 hours of ethnographic field observations will be conducted in the two clinics (Oslo and Bergen). The data will be coded with the involvement from the user-organization ProLAR-nett. As a method for analysis, three separate dimensions of HAT will be described and investigated in three separate articles; the relational dimension, the medical dimension and the structural dimension.
Objectives
The project is part of an larger evaluation project on heroin assisted treatment, lead by Norwegian Centre for Addiction Research. The goal of this project is to provide patients insights about the impact of the treatment, through qualitative in-depth interviews.
Project period
August 2023 – august 2026
Financing
The project is funded by the Unit for Clinical Research on Addictions (RusForsk) at Oslo University Hospital.