Sober living homes are about more than simply providing residents with a place to continue working on their sobriety. There are several quality living standards you should uphold to ensure you’re providing high-quality care at all times.
Unsure of what these quality standards are? There’s no need to worry. Our guide will provide in-depth detail about the standards you should seek to adhere to and information about each one and how to do this.
If you’re looking to fall amongst the best sober living homes, you need to know these quality standards to do so.
1. Always Operate the Home With Integrity
The first quality standard is always to operate your sober living home with integrity in mind. To do this, we recommend you take the time to create a strong mission statement.
You should write the mission statement with the overall vision you have in mind for your sober living home. It’s also important to review the compliance regulations in your area.
Take time to ensure your policies and procedures align with these requirements at all times. For example, suppose you’re creating various forms of marketing materials used to attract residents.
As you create these forms of marketing, there are some things you should refrain from doing, like selling a dream. You should consistently seek to be honest about your intentions.
Some items to avoid including in your marketing campaigns include:
- False claims or claims that have no evidence to support them
- Misleading information about the price to apply to your sober living home
- Listing client testimonials that only show your sober living home in a positive light
Another part of being an integrity-driven sober living home is keeping accurate records at all times. These records should include information about the charges each resident is responsible for paying.
You should also record the contract between yourself and the residents who live in the home.
2. Transparent Financial Communication
The sober living homes near me should always be forthcoming about residents’ potential financial responsibilities when applying to live there. Take time to identify the system you’ll use to document all financial policies between yourself and residents.
It’s also important to document the financial policies and requirements that are in place. This is to ensure the home continues to run the way it should be.
You should make it clear that there are fees associated with any damages to the sober living home as a result of resident recklessness. Another key component of your financial communication should be clarity about benefits for your staff.
Staff needs to have in-depth information about their benefits package. Their package includes paid work leave and the salary they’ll be paid for working within the sober living home.
3. Constantly Review Data
How are you going to understand the areas of your sober living home that need to improve if you don’t have data to analyze? There should be procedures and documentation policies your staff uses to collect different forms of data.
Once the data is collected, there should be a process in place you use to review the data. After reviewing the data, make changes as needed to the policy.
This is to ensure future and current residents receive the quality of care they deserve. Having this form of policy allows you to continue to improve your quality of care while upholding overall standards.
4. Keep Residents Rights in Mind
Every resident that applies to live in your sober living home has rights that you can’t infringe upon. Before someone moves into the home, take the time to review their rights before any contracts are signed.
You should have an orientation process that’s used to go over these rights and other need-to-know information in the handbook. After the orientation is complete, both yourself and the potential resident will decide if it’s the right fit.
From there, you can move forward with signing all paperwork. The agreement given to potential residents to sign should include information about:
- Move-in and move-out policy
- Services residents can use while living in the home
- Financial terms including how to make monthly rent payments
- Plan of continued treatment
There should also be a policy that outlines how residents’ personal property is protected. As well as what happens if something is damaged while the resident lives there.
Everything you do when operating a business should center around keeping accurate documentation. As well as communicating clearly with the people around you.
5. Move With Caution
Before you make any decisions, you’ve got to weigh the pros and cons of those decisions because they’ll affect your business overall. You need to secure a business license and insurance to cover your sober living home in the event that something happens.
You’ll also need to have documentation that the owner of the home you’re operating within has knowledge of your business. Most places have stipulations that must be met when addiction treatment is offered because of the risky nature of the business.
Conducting business with caution in mind also means taking the time to perform background checks on all members of staff. This includes members of the community that intend to volunteer to work with the residents on different projects.
Keep in mind staff members are essential to the recovery process for residents. Therefore, you need to screen them and ensure they’re qualified to work within your sober living home.
6. Promote an Atmosphere of Self
You might be wondering what it means to promote an atmosphere that revolves around self and advocating for others. This means you promote the act of people taking responsibility for themselves and the actions of others.
A key part of treatment is learning to take responsibility for everything you do regardless of the consequences. To do this, create a grievance policy and outline the steps residents can take to file one.
The grievances should go in a locked and secure place that only staff members have access to. This will help to increase the trust between yourself and residents living in your sober living home.
It might also help to have one of the residents that have been in the home for a while act as a point of contact for other residents. Sometimes it’s more beneficial to speak with someone that’s been in the same situation as you rather than speaking directly to members of staff.
7. Privacy Protection for Residents
Although residents will need to get used to sharing living spaces with others, this doesn’t mean they need to sacrifice their privacy. Each resident should understand the policies surrounding privacy and how it’s offered to residents.
We recommend again checking the laws in your area. This is because they will outline specific steps your sober living home needs to take to remain compliant with the law in terms of privacy.
The only time privacy should be infringed upon is if one of the residents is putting themselves or other residents in danger.
8. Recovery-Driven Ideas
Each idea you have for your business should be created with the concept of recovery in mind. Remember, the purpose of a sober living home is to offer residents a place where they can tradition from treatment back into everyday life.
Your sober living home should support a sober life with everything it offers to residents. The staff plan you have should support the needs of the residents that live within the home.
It might also help if the creation of house rules be split between staff and residents. This makes the residents feel as if they have a say in the way they’re living their lives.
This promotes the idea we spoke about above, dealing with promoting reliance on oneself instead of everyone else around you. Another suggestion is to create a schedule that details the days of the month and what addiction resources residents can access on those days.
It allows residents to plan whether or not they’ll attend that recovery resource or not. The staff is responsible for reminding residents about the upcoming activities.
Quality Standards for Sober Living Homes
Sober living homes must abide by quality living standards the same way other businesses do. This ensures you provide quality care for everyone who lives in the home.
If you need help determining what these standards of care look like, review our tips above. But, moving forward, it’s important to get the word out there about your sober living home, and one way to do this is by listing it on Taste Recovery.
Need help doing this? Contact us today, and let’s fill those beds.
