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CITY SERVICES
Drug and/or alcohol prevention work with staff
and businesses in the City of London has been
of ‘limited scope and unknown efficacy’,
according to a service review report from the
Corporation of London. The document
recommends increased spending on
‘prevention work with healthy or low-risk users’
to avoid potential future problems.
The
importance of providing proper support for
employees with drug or alcohol issues is one of
the themes of the forthcoming Recovery
Festival. Details at www.recoveryfestival.org.uk
PRICE PROPOSALS
The Welsh Government has launched a
consultation on its public health white paper,
Listening to you – your health matters
, which
includes proposals to introduce a minimum
price per unit of alcohol and restrict the use of
e-cigarettes in public places. ‘The Welsh
Government’s view remains that introducing
minimum unit pricing for alcohol would be
entirely in accordance with prudent healthcare
principles,’ says the document. Meanwhile, the
UK government has released its first report on
the progress of the public health responsibility
deal, which promised to reduce the number of
alcohol units sold by 1bn per year. So far the
reduction has been a quarter of that, says
Responsibility deal alcohol network: pledge to
remove 1bn units of alcohol from the market by
the end of 2015.
Report at www.gov.uk; Wales
consultation at wales.gov.uk. See news focus,
page 6
PBR PAYBACK
Payment by results (PBR) is holding back
innovation in the public sector, according to a
report from NCVO. Small and specialist
organisations lack the reserves to cover the
period until they’re paid, says
Payment by
results and the voluntary sector
, while the
ability to hit targets can also be affected by
failures in services outside the provider’s
control. ‘Current PbR practice risks excluding
the specialist charities we really need to
involve in order to develop public services,’
said NCVO chief executive Stuart Etherington.
Available at www.ncvo.org.uk
NEW ERA
More people than ever are buying drugs online,
according the findings of the
2014 global drug
survey
, which questioned nearly 80,000 people
from more than 40 countries. Cocaine was
voted the worst value for money drug in the
world, while MDMA was voted the best and
alcohol remained ‘the biggest cause of concern
among friends and the biggest culprit in sending
people to emergency department’.
www.globaldrugsurvey.com
The safeguarding of children is not being
sufficiently prioritised by professionals making
decisions about drug treatment medications, says
a new report from Adfam. Improved training is
needed for treatment services, pharmacies, GPs
and social workers to highlight the potential
dangers, says
Medications in drug treatment:
tackling the risks to children
.
The report looks at 20 serious case reviews from the
last ten years involving the ingestion of treatment
medications by children, and says that ‘too many
children are being put at risk’ by insufficient safeguards.
The 20 case reviews involved the ingestion of
medication by 23 children, 17 of whom died. Their
average age was two.
While some of the children died as a result of
medications being stored inappropriately, there is also a
‘rare but real’ use of methadone as a pacifier for small
children, says the document. Methadone was the cause
of 15 of the deaths, and buprenorphine the cause of
one. However, the review findings are ‘not contributing
to national learning on managing risk’, says Adfam.
‘Tragedies occur, and we can never eliminate risks
completely,’ says the report. ‘But in conducting this
research our thinking has always been: on a systemic
level, are we doing all that we can to make sure these
incidents don’t keep happening? And based on our
findings, the answer, so far, is no.’
Alongside improved analysis of the serious case
reviews, the report calls for better national data
collection on the number of parents allowed to take
home OST medication and the number of children
admitted to hospital as a result of ingesting them.
Around 60,000 people caring for children currently
receive drug treatment prescriptions, and not all cases
of ingestion reach serious case review level, Adfam
points out, meaning the true extent of the risk remains
unknown. Many of the case reviews found that
professionals ‘missed or minimised’ risk factors during
the families’ contact with services and took an ‘overly
optimistic’ view of progress on the part of parents, many
of whom were able to ‘manipulate or deceive services
into believing they were making positive changes’.
The research uncovered a ‘variety of unsafe storage
practices’, including keeping methadone in children’s
beakers or on bedside tables, as well as not disposing
of containers properly. The report wants to see agreed
safety plans and the provision of free lockable storage
boxes for parents who take medication home, and a ‘re-
emphasising’ of the importance of safeguarding
children in line with existing NICE guidance. Treatment
agencies should also be represented on local
safeguarding children boards, it stresses.
‘Just one of these cases would be one case too
many, but this research shows that they have happened
with depressing regularity over the last decade,’ said
Adfam chief executive Vivienne Evans. ‘The cases are
frequent and similar enough that we should be much
louder and more honest about the risks of methadone
to children. We need a more proactive and nationally
coordinated plan to tackle these risks, rather than
waiting for every area in the country to experience a
tragedy before anyone takes action.
‘Medications and recovery aren’t mutually exclusive
and we’re very supportive of substitution treatment,’
she continued. ‘However, safeguarding should be first
and foremost in professionals’ minds when working with
parents who use drugs and alcohol, and the report
suggests this isn’t always the case.’
Report at www.adfam.org.uk
4 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| May 2014
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
News |
Round-up
NEWS IN BRIEF
OST: more needs to be
done to protect children
MOOVING IMAGES
: a selection of artwork,
music and writing from prisons, secure hospitals,
children’s homes and people on probation in the
north west is being displayed at
the Castlefield Gallery in
Manchester from 9 May until 15
June. The work displayed in
Snail
Porridge
has been selected by
artist Bob and Roberta Smith from
entries to the Koestler Awards, an
annual prison arts scheme that has
been running for more than half a
century. ‘Art has a serious purpose
in criminal justice – it makes
offenders pursue the discipline and
truthfulness that are essential to
building lives free from crime,’ said
Koestler Trust chief executive Tim
Robertson. ‘But lots of prison art is also great
art, and this exhibition brings it into the heart of
the contemporary art world.’