Table 1.

Categories of substance use services and definitions

Service category		Definition
	Home-based/mobile	This involves withdrawal management with support provided in a client’s home or other setting while the person continues to live at home or has other safe accommodation. It may also involve visits to a central location (e.g., addictions program) during the day, while returning home at night. This service may involve a medical assessment by a physician and regular monitoring by a nurse and health care worker during the withdrawal process to provide medical management and support.
Withdrawal management services	Community/medical residential	This involves withdrawal management in a non-hospital residential setting. Although the environment and supportive services are largely nonmedical, this service may involve a medical assessment by a physician and regular monitoring by a nurse and health care worker during the withdrawal process to provide basic medical management and support.
	Hospital/complexity enhanced	This involves withdrawal management where support is provided within a health care setting with a high level of medical and psychiatric capability. Treatment can be provided with or without drug therapy but typically involves medication management, for example, for physical stabilization and withdrawal, and for co-occurring mental disorders.
	Minimal	This involves a very limited number of sessions of substance use-specific counselling activities in individual or group formats. These sessions may be quite brief and sometimes offered on an outreach basis.
Substance use community services	Moderate	This involves a scheduled course of 1- to 2-hour sessions of substance use-specific counselling in group sessions or an individual format. This category also includes opioid replacement services with or without a counselling component.
	Intensive	This involves a structured schedule of substance use-specific counselling activities taking place over some days/evenings, or part days/evenings, of the week. This category may include the initial intensive phase of opiate replacement therapy. Programs are generally offered for a defined number of weeks while the client resides elsewhere.
	Supportive recovery	This involves accommodation and a range of lifestyle and psychosocial supports in an alcohol and drug-free setting but not including a highly structured schedule of treatment.
Substance use residential services	Residential treatment	These services provide accommodation as well as structured, scheduled interventions and activities specifically designed to ameliorate substance use problems and/or moderate severity co-occurring disorders.
	Complexity-enhanced treatment	These services provide accommodation within a health care setting with a high level of medical and psychiatric capability and which involve structured, scheduled programs of substance use treatment activities for clients with significant substance use problems, co-occurring medical/psychiatric disorders, or other complex needs.
	Internet-based (virtual) and mobile-based technologies	These innovations are emerging as critically important in the delivery of substance use services and supports and have been increasingly harnessed to distribute educational and health literacy materials as well as deliver a range of self-administered and therapist-assisted interventions.
Other services and supports	Mutual aid groups	Supports available through groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are widely recognized as a key component of substance use systems.
	Housing	This involves accommodation that addresses the continuum of housing needs of people with substance use problems, and/or co-occurring disorders. Options vary from short-term low-threshold shelter to supervised supportive housing to longer term third-stage housing with access to more limited supports.