BACKGROUND:The implementation of quality standards in the treatment of substance use disorders in Lithuania is not well documented in the literature.AIMS: To describe the process of the development of quality standards from grassroots initiatives to their integration into mainstream healthcare under the leadership of the Ministry of Health.METHODS: Narrative review of retrieved documents, including related legal acts, followed by a subsequent content analysis.RESULTS: The implementation was divided into three stages characterised by specific activities, leading stakeholders, and the degree of integration into the national healthcare system.The driving element in the initial stage turned out to be grassroots initiatives from professional associations and healthcare providers.Because of the availability of private, EU, and UN agencies' funding to curb the HIV epidemic, Lithuanian professionals had an opportunity to provide assistance in establishing quality standards in Eastern European and Central Asian countries and to learn from Western good practices.During later stages the Lithuanian national system of quality assurance was fully developed and SUD treatment was gradually integrated into the mainstream healthcare system, with the Ministry of Health assuming a leading role.CONCLUSIONS: In the period of deep transition since 1990, when the national quality assurance system was weak, professional associations have played a major role.Exposure to best practices in other countries was valuable in empowering professionals to initiate and implement quality standards which were later integrated into the national quality assurance system.

The European Prevention Curriculum (EUPC) and The Universal Treatment Curriculum (UTC) are paradigms of the efforts to achieve an international standardized training for drug demand reduction. Both curricula are based on evidencebased knowledge and practice and follow the quality standards established by important international institutions such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). In addition to training directly aimed at professionals, it is important to include academic undergraduate and postgraduate programs with these standardized curriculums, both for students and professionals. The experience of establishing the EUPC-UTC Master of Addictions at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) constitutes a pioneering example of an academic study that blends the two international curriculums.

Behavioural support has been shown to possess high efficacy in aiding smokers to stop smoking at a level at least similar to nicotine replacement therapies (NRT) while causing no adverse physiological effects. Furthermore, the effects of behavioural interventions and NRT appear to be roughly additive. The effectiveness of interventions appears to increase with the frequency of contact with an eHealth application, with daily contact showing higher efficacy compared to weekly sessions with a trained stopsmoking specialist. Previous automated counsellors based on a motivational interview approach, lapse preparation, and lapse management are rigid in their therapeutic path, with limited ability to reflect the needs and the specific situation of a given patient. AIMS: This report aims to describe a possible approach to developing a more engaging, patient-tailored automated counsellor based on recent advances in the natural language processing (NLP) field that should make

BACKGROUND: General population surveys present a useful tool for getting information on drug use prevalence, but they often fail to reach a sufficient number of users, which is required to get detailed information on use patterns or other characteristics. Web surveys, especially when they use social networking sites, might present a complementary mechanism for getting a better picture of drug use by reaching hard-to-reach populations. AIM: The main objective of this study was to examine Facebook advertisements as a recruitment strategy in the “European Web Survey on Drugs: patterns of use”, a project organized by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. METHODS: Recruitment campaigns invited adults aged 18+ years who had consumed at least one drug (cannabis, MDMA/ ecstasy, amphetamines, or cocaine) in the past 12 months to complete an online survey. The advertisements were created in Facebook’s Advertisement program and were used in Croatia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. RESULTS: Among the eligible participants recruited via Facebook (N=5256), 68.1% were from Croatia, 24.4% from Switzerland, and 7.5% from the Netherlands. The Croatian and Swiss participants were younger and more likely to be males compared to the Dutch participants. Chi-square tests showed that there were significant differences in the frequency of drug use between the samples from the different countries for almost all drugs. CONCLUSION: The Facebook recruitment strategy was successful in reaching young adults, as well as recreational drug users, although the costs, campaign duration, available budget, and content of the ad images differed among the countries.