Session 1
Healthy connections
The day’s first session kicked off by
looking at making effective
connections with health services
‘W
e’ve got a lot of work to do developing pathways to make
sure that the health of service users is taken as seriously
as that of everyone else,’ CGL’s director of nursing, Stacey
Smith, told Get Connected delegates. ‘We have a fantastic
opportunity to make a massive impact.’
In terms of tackling hepatitis C, it was important that
drug treatment services realised that they held a huge cohort of people who could
benefit from testing and treatment, she said, and CGL had launched its own
successful hepatitis C strategy to reduce the number of service users who become ill
or die prematurely as a result of hep C infection.
‘We have current and previous injectors in our
system, and the treatment landscape has
significantly improved for drug users with
hepatitis C. It’s a two-way process – we need to
work with the NHS, and they need to work with
us. If we can match up people’s drug treatment
with their hepatitis C treatment, think of the
fantastic things we can do.’
Drug services held enormous amounts of
invaluable data, she told the conference. ‘That’s
data about people who may have been
diagnosed ten or 15 years ago, as well as data
on people coming in now.’ Where previously
hepatitis C treatment had been ‘painful, hard,
long and not always successful’, that was no
longer the case, and it was vital to make sure
that service users were aware of this. ‘We need
to let people know that it’s not about interferon
any more. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if every
service user who walked into a drug service
demanded to be tested and treated?’
Services were perfectly placed to play a
crucial role in the drive towards the complete
stACey smIth
‘Universal credit
has made it
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6 | drinkanddrugsnews | March 2018
eradication of
hepatitis C, she said,
and were also
equipped with vital
skills in areas like
motivational
interviewing and
contingency management. ‘We know there are
people out there who are still injecting, so we
need proper use of harm reduction. We need to
look at re-engaging with needle exchanges and
talking about what harm reduction really
means.’ Key to this were areas such as optimum
prescribing, the development of evidence-based
models with treatment on site, and proactive
partnerships with bodies like the Hepatitis C
Trust, the NHS and service user groups.
‘We have it within our capability to eliminate
hepatitis C within drug and alcohol services,’ she
told delegates, and CGL now had four models
running across the country that matched up
people’s treatment and prescriptions. ‘Let’s get
innovative – whichever way works for you, do it.
The opportunity we have now is massive.’
R
ecovery champion Alesha Watkins
told the conference how she had
initially been offered testing and
treatment after accessing a needle
exchange in Northamptonshire in
2009. ‘A couple of weeks later I was
advised I had hep C, but I wasn’t ready to
engage,’ she said. She continued to inject,
‘After seven
years of having
hepatitis C,
I stand here
today free of
any virus.’
AleshA WAtkIns
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