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‘We’re beyond
service user involvement –
it’s about service user leadership.
Everybody’s got skills – it’s not
hard to spot a leader.’
Peter Yarwood, Red Rose Recovery
‘Service users in
differ ent parts of
the country meet
different challenges
because of different
local authority
policies... There is a
massive need for
services to start
connecting. Let’s
get a network and
take it from there.’
highest number of deaths we’ve ever
seen, and yet people are talking about
yoga and therapeutic approaches, or
whatever it may be. Is there any
engagement around what’s happening
in the streets to people? What exactly
is the point if it’s not representing the
needs of everyone in the community,
not just the people accessing that
service?’
Service users did need to be
developing forums that reached out to
people not in treatment, agreed
Release executive director Niamh
Eastwood. ‘But it’s also the human
rights of people in treatment that are
being diminished in many parts of the
country,’ with conditionality linked to
methadone scripts, people being
‘coerced’ into treatment or having
their doses reduced. ‘Quality
treatment is needed in every area, and
I think a national network could help
push that,’ she said.
Collective Voice would be ‘really
supportive’ of a national network, said
Mark Pryke
its director, Oliver Standing, whether
‘it’s service users or people who use
drugs,’ while Jon Roberts added that, ‘We don’t want to disenfranchise the majority
of people who might be using drugs but who are not in treatment. We’re shifting
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from service user involvement, so called,
to peer-led interventions and creating
communities that can reach out to
anybody. The landscape is definitely
changing – you can bolt skill sets onto
the right attitude with people who
want to give back, but it’s a lot harder
to bolt an attitude onto a skill set.’
‘We’re way past service user
involvement,’ Red Rose Recovery CEO
Peter Yarwood told the session. ‘We’re
having conversations about service
user leadership. Everybody’s got skills – it’s not hard to pick out a leader, whether
they’re in treatment or out of it, whether they’re in active addiction or abstinence-
based recovery. It’s easy to spot a leader and create opportunities for them to have
a go and get involved. If we’re not bringing people in active addiction with us on
this journey, we’re missing a massive asset of people who have privileged access to
the very communities we need to be tapping into. I don’t know what we’d call it,
but there’s definitely a need for a network on a national scale.’ This could also then
be used to influence and apply pressure at local level, he stressed.
‘W
e don’t know about the needs of the people we never meet,’
said session chair Carole Sharma. ‘Providers imagine they
know what’s going on in the drugs environment they serve,
but they may be very wrong’, while B3 service manager
Radha Allen added that, ‘chaotic drug users aren’t
represented in a lot of service user groups’.
Part of the network’s function could be to hold providers to account, said Carole
Sharma, along with using experience to improve services and drive policy change.
When people were not engaging with services, there were ‘reasons for that’, she
said. ‘You have the drug strategy, but no one joins anything up – with childcare,
looking after elderly people, homelessness, everything that’s going wrong. I was
very angry when drug and alcohol management went to local authorities. I’m
sorry, but I don’t trust local authorities with something that’s as difficult and
complex as this, and the public health budget is just getting whittled away. The
new ten-year NHS plan is saying prevention and public health is where it’s at, but
they’re taking the money away. So for that reason alone I’d say that you really need
to get your act together locally.’
When it came to influencing policy, the last drug strategy ‘reads beautifully, but
it’s absolutely full of shit because no one has the money to implement it’, said Tim
Sampey. ‘What’s the point of writing a policy that nobody can stick to? We need to
be in a position to point that out, but we’re not.’
March 2019 | drinkanddrugsnews | 11