Recently, we turned our focus on family skills training in substance abuse prevention. This is a new area of interest to us, but we are very excited to start working on this because scientific research has proved it is a very effective approach to prevent children and youth from using substances and other risky behaviour.

In October we held a Technical Consultation Meeting in Vienna, where we invited researchers, practitioners and programme managers from 12 countries around the world. During the three day meeting the participants agreed on guidelines and principles for effective implementation and cultural adaptation of family skills training programmes. We are planning to publish these in early 2008 to provide guidance for policy makers and project managers who are interested in family skills training.

In fact, we started our work already before the meeting when we began to collect information on family skills training programmes that have been used in substance abuse prevention around the world. We want to identify as many examples as possible of evidence based family skills programmes for our review. So far, we have received quite many responses from most parts of the world and we are still looking.

The experts, who attended the Technical Consultation Meeting, also helped us to set the criteria for family skills training programmes that will allow us to find among the volume of responses we have received the programmes with best evidence, programmes with promising evidence, and the programmes with an evidence-based content. The idea is that at the end we will have a list of evidence based programmes, each with a short description. In this way, a policy maker or a programme manager that would like to start a family skill programme would already have a list of evidence based programmes to choose from. We hope to be able to publish this list online next year.

If you know of a family skills programme or if you are yourself developing or implementing one, we would like to ask you to fill in the forms to share the details of your programme with us. You can find the form in English, French, Spanish, Russian and Portugese.

Otherwise, keep watching this space for updates on activities!