Session 2
N
ext the conference heard
from representatives of the
newly formed Faculty of
Commissioning (DDN,
February, page 10). ‘We’re
genuinely interested in
listening to you,’ the faculty’s Mark Gilman
told delegates. ‘Commissioning is the design
of services, and the primary reason for
establishing the faculty was to get your input.
In the past, you could argue, the service user
voice has always been mediated through
providers. I’m convinced that it should be
heard directly.’ Another key purpose of the
faculty was to look at whether ‘what we’re
doing with the money we’ve got left is the best
we can be doing’, he stressed.
‘The bottom line about all these new
treatments and innovations is that they’ll
either cost money or save money,’ said Terry
Pearson. ‘So we need to hear from you about
whether they’re effective.’ The faculty aimed to
‘the service-user
voice should be
heard directly.’
‘it’s about choice. find out
who your local
commissioner is, and let’s
bring some new thinking in.’
terry Pearson and
Paul musGraVe
12 | drinkanddrugsnews | March 2018
mark Gilman
improve treatment, but
that was ‘not the
common picture’, he
said, as all too often
providers were held to
contracts that severely
restricted innovation.
‘For me, it’s about
choice,’ Paul Musgrave
told the session. ‘As
commissioners we need
to have that link with
service users. There’s a
potential system packed
with choices, but as
service users you’d
probably tell us that you
see fewer of them. This
is not tokenistic,
whatever you may have
experienced in the past.
Find out who your local
commissioner is, and
let’s bring some new
thinking in – we used to
think the world was flat.’
K
errie Hudson
told the
session how
she’d been a
heroin user for
15 years and
her ‘only choice’ in terms of
treatment had been
methadone. ‘I used to go to
work with the full intention
of using drugs when I
finished, and methadone wasn’t for me. I
wanted to go to work, take my children on
holiday, go on family days out, and you can’t
go with the flow of life because everything
centres around the chemist’s.’
However, things changed when a forward
thinking drug worker offered her subutex. ‘I
was staying within a 30ml limit of methadone,
which started to open up choices – and one of
those was subutex,’ she said. ‘Getting that
choice opened my world – I could think, I could
feel. I’d left school a heroin addict but I still
had those hopes, those aspirations, and subutex
gave me the clarity to go to university. We all
need support, and quite often we have to do
things for ourselves. We need to remove this
hierarchy from recovery – it’s great to be
involved with the faculty and to get a direct line
to the people who create our services. No one
ever asked me what I needed, and this has
given me that voice.’ DDN
‘We need to
remove
hierarchy from
recovery.’
kerrie Hudson
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com