Hospitals and Institutions

Hospitals and institutions subcommittees conduct panels that carry the NA message to addicts who often have no other way of hearing our message. Treatment panels are conducted for patients at addiction treatment centers, mental health facilities, and therapeutic communities. Correctional panels are held for inmates at jails, prisons, and forensic hospitals. The Hospitals and Institutions Handbook, available from your local H&I subcommittee or by writing the World Service Office, explains more about how to conduct panels, interact with facility administrators, and organize subcommittee work. The amount of work your local H&I subcommittee does will depend on a variety of factors: the number of treatment and correctional facilities in your area, the number of NA members in your area who are interested in H&I service, and the amount of collective experience in H&I work in your NA community. H&I subcommittee responsibilities sometimes overlap those of the local public information subcommittee. For this reason, we encourage H&I and PI subcommittees to closely cooperate with one another. In some areas, H&I and PI subcommittees regularly send one or two members to each other’s meetings to maintain communications, thereby minimizing the potential for conflict in these two key fields of service.