NNEF CoNFErENCE
‘Dcrs don’t have
to be posh
expensive places –
just a roof and a
kettle.’
opiates should be given at least one kit.’
‘Naloxone is only part of the solution, but a
vital part of the puzzle,’ she added. ‘There needs
to be adequate access to harm reduction advice
and information.’
t the end of a full and informative
day, it was Dr Judith Yates’ job to spell
out ‘how to reduce harm and save
money’. The clearest message was
that ‘we should be ending the war on people who use drugs,’ she said.
Decriminalisation was the only model that made sense, ‘and we should do this first’.
Secondly, the harm reduction measures that the conference had considered
were highly cost effective: ‘DCRs don’t have to be posh expensive places – just a
roof and a kettle,’ she said.
The take-home naloxone programme was proving to be extremely effective and
was only challenged by stigma and ignorance: ‘There isn’t another drug that can
A
‘I wish I could
have bought an
idiot’s guide to
setting up a Dcr.’
Kasey elMore
Kasey Elmore visited the
conference from Australia to share
learning points from developing
and building Australia’s second
drug consumption room.
‘I
wanted to design the best DCR in the world,
with no risk. But lesson number one is to accept
that this isn’t possible,’ she said. You had to
acknowledge that the service that you want to
run, and others in the sector want you to run –
your clients, the government, the wider community –
all look incredibly different.
‘Our model had to be located at our workplace and
be medically supervised – an integrated model with
nurses, doctors and registered drug and alcohol
10 | drinkanddrugsnews | May 2018
Dr JuDITh yaTes
save a life for £15 in a few minutes,’ she said.
Her work in recording drug-related deaths reinforced time and again that these
deaths were preventable and showed that 78 per cent of people were not in
treatment at the time of death.
‘There is huge scope for getting these people in treatment,’ she said, calling for
an end to re-commissioning and funding cuts. ‘Stop wasting money on the drug
war and stop treating people who use drugs as criminals.’ DDN
workers,’ she explained. ‘It’s in a residential area, located
on a large public housing estate, and runs a needle and
syringe programme giving out 90,000 syringes a month.’
Consulting with the client group was essential,
but she felt there wasn’t enough time to do it
properly. As they designed the layout of facilities,
they came up with a three-stage model with zones
for registration, injecting and aftercare, which
seemed logical but already posed a problem – that
people had to inject to get access to the aftercare
services. So it became necessary to discuss a stage
four, where people could access mental health
services etc, if they didn’t inject.
There were also some conditions imposed by their
licence that they had to adhere to, such as not allowing
pregnant women or under-18s to use the facility.
An important part of design was to get the toilets
right, with needle disposal, and their location in
zones three and four. Would pets be allowed in a
health facility, and could a dog get in the way of
medical staff? Should there be secure pet parking on
site so they were not stolen?
Liaising with key stakeholders on the project
meant working with people who had never worked
with this client group, so ‘pick your battles and build
an external consultancy team’