A former alcoholic, who now runs highly successful support groups for problem drinkers, talks to Health Editor Barry Nelson

THESE days Kevan Martin is a man in demand.

Every other week he is asked to speak to groups of health professionals up and down the country about his charity’s work in the North-East.

Since he set up an unofficial support group for problem drinkers in his flat more than a decade ago his vision of using former drinkers as “recovery coaches” to help heavy drinkers break their dependence on booze has proved to be highly successful.

His message – that the most effective way to encourage alcohol-dependent drinkers to give up is to use people who have already overcome their addiction – has been taken up with a vengeance by the NHS in the North-East.

Now the charity he founded – the Northern Engagement into Recovery from Addiction Foundation (NERAF) – runs NHS-funded support groups in Sunderland, Gateshead and South Tyneside.

Recently the Sunderland-based charity was awarded a contract to set up a similar group in Darlington.

Kevan has a dry sense of humour and he sums up his life this way: “I was a workaholic, then a sportaholic then an alcoholic and now I am back being a workaholic!”

GROWING up in Kendal in Cumbria, Kevan’s first passion was sport.

“I was into cross-country running and judo and wanted to join the Royal Marines when I left school, but I had very bad knee injury and that put paid to those plans,” says Kevan.

A fall-back job on the building sites was his introduction to heavy drinking. “It was on the building sites that I got my taste for booze. Instead of going to the gym I ended up in the pub.”

A failed marriage sent Kevan across the Pennines in search of a fresh start. Unfortunately, when he moved to Whitley Bay he hadn’t bargained for the hard-drinking culture in the North-East. Eventually, he progressed from heavy drinking sessions in the pubs and clubs to solo drinking at home.

“By now I had lost my job. I was drinking 24 hours a day, drinking myself into oblivion, waking up and then drinking again.”

This wretched existence continued for several years, punctuated by unsuccessful efforts to stop.

His saviour was a very supportive GP, who agreed to prescribe the same drug used by celebrity footballer George Best to beat alcoholism.

“I knew that if I carried on drinking I was going to die and if I drank the Antabuse I was going to die. The drug helped me break the cycle for me. Suddenly I knew I couldn’t have a drink.”

Kevan threw himself into self-improvement, qualifying at college as a fitness instructor.

“I realised that to keep off the drink I had to do something else. I went to college and then did voluntary work.” His experience working with the North Tyneside Drug Action team made him wonder if something similar should be tried with alcoholics.

At that time there were very few facilities for problem drinkers.

“Basically there were a few detox places and there was the AA (Alcoholics Anonymous).”

That’s why he took matters into his own hands and started a weekly support group in his flat. After a few months he was given a room in the Newcastle headquarters of the North East Council on Addictions or NECA.

“At that stage I went through a lot of red tape and set up NERAF as a charity. Being a numbskull from the building trade, it wasn’t easy,” jokes Kevan.

KEVAN was then asked to open support groups in Gateshead and then Sunderland. “What started to happen was that workers from NECA would phone me and tell me that it had got someone who wants to come to myr group but they haven’t got the confidence to just walk in.”

So Kevan used to meet them for a coffee an hour before the meeting and explain what the support group was all about.

“That was when what we call peer mentoring and recovery coaching was born,” recalls Kevin. “That is where it started. I wish I had a fiver for every time people said, ‘You don’t know what I am going through’. I actually do.”

Kevan stresses that his approach is not the same as counselling. “We don’t do counselling, we do what we call recovery coaching. Coaching is about challenging people, challenging their behaviour. To me an alcohol problem is a lifestyle problem.

It’s a behaviour, it’s a habit and we have got to break that habit. That is what the coaching is all about.”

The next big step for Kevan’s project was Back On The Map, a regeneration project in Hendon, a deprived part of Sunderland. The big breakthrough was when NHS South of Tyne and Wear decided to invest more than £5m in treatment services for problem drinkers.

This gave an even bigger role to NERAF.

“I was asked to repeat what we were doing in Sunderland in Gateshead and South Tyneside,” says Kevan.

The most recent expansion is Darlington, where services are being set up at the moment.

“We are currently recruiting staff in Darlington. They will be recovery coaches but it is booze and drugs we are talking about now,” says Kevan.

Kevan says the much-criticised ‘party culture’ which has damaged so many North-Eastern lives is still in full swing. In fact the economic downturn has made it worse in some respects.

“We have been hit very hard. The people who were drinking because they were worried about losing their jobs are now drinking more having lost their jobs. People are getting liver disease at a younger and younger age.

“I think everybody knows the problem that we have, it is a question of people doing something about it.”