The NiNTh NaTioNal Service USer coNfereNce
12 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| March 2016
‘T
he subtitle of this session is
“have we lost our duty of
care”, and that’s something
that really worries me,’
Chris Ford told delegates. Many
services now had a ‘one size fits all’
agenda, or ‘to be more accurate, one
size fits nobody,’ she said. ‘They’re
concerned about their PbRs or
whatever. As the Archbishop of
Canterbury said, the way a society is
measured is by how we care for our
most vulnerable’.
The ‘deafening silence’ around the
fact that drug-related deaths had
risen by more than 60 per cent in two
years was a ‘real indictment’, agreed
Alex Boyt. ‘Imagine if that was in any
other part of society. I’m not anti-
recovery, but I am worried that it pulls
some people forward but leaves
others behind. Service users in
Camden, where I work, create
newsletters that have now become
just pages and pages of obituaries.’
Wales and Northern Ireland had
actually seen death rates fall in the last
two years, he pointed out, while
Scotland had experienced an increase
and in England it varied according to
region. ‘Naloxone by itself is not going
to reverse the trend.’When people
arrived at services now they were
‘shattered, tired, broken’, he said. ‘They
need to be held by services, but
increasingly they’re subject to recovery-
based criteria. One service manager
said to me recently that, “These days
we have to get them in and out before
we even get to know them”.’
Recovery also now meant so many
different things to so many different
people that ‘it seems to me that when
we use it we’re not communicating
properly’, he argued. ‘I think it’s
important that when you celebrate
recovery you’re aware that what works
for you may not work for other
people.’
Indicative of the overall problem
was that one current target was for
hepatitis C testing, he said. ‘So you
can say you’ve offered testing to 99
per cent of your clients, but only 1 per
cent are treated, which is obscene.’
‘Thirty years ago I started going to
a drug service in Paddington, and my
main feeling was fear,’ Beryl Poole
told the session. ‘Now those elements
of fear are creeping in again, and I
never thought they would. You have
drug workers talking to you about
recovery with these fixed, rictus
smiles. We used to diss the NTA but
now that we don’t have them we miss
them. Who’s going to advocate on our
behalf now?’
‘A lot’s been said about service user
involvement having a voice, but it’s
lost its way,’ said Steve Freer. ‘In the
days of the NTA it was statutory, but
service users are feeling totally
disillusioned now, and they’re being
crushed underfoot.
On the key question of how to
create a meaningful voice for service
users it was vital that ‘we should all
be on the same side’, said Ford, but
one delegate argued that ‘we have
lost our voice. It’s all being muddied
by money, and we’re losing our
passion.’
Organisations had a vested
interest in not promoting service user
involvement, argued another. ‘It’s a bit
of a monster once it’s let out of the
cage – they don’t want service users
to have that power. I’m a service user
representative but I’m not listened to,
not really. Once you let that monster
out of the cage how do you control it,
what do you do next?’
What it amounted to was a ‘divide
and conquer’ process, said another
delegate. ‘What we have to do is be
fighting this top-down inequality.
There’s too much arguing about the
minutiae.’ Poverty was by far the
biggest driver of drug-related deaths,
said Ford. ‘In the 1980s, the most
STATE OF THE NATION
One of the day’s lunchtime
sessions heard delegates
debate the current state of
English drug policy
What price life?
Services and commissioners are being
squeezed hard financially, and the only way
to maximise funding is to increase success-
ful completions by pushing people through
the system, Alex Boyt told
DDN
.
T
here are no targets, no incentives, no money attached to keeping
people alive and safe. The largest client group at risk of death are those
not in services for a year or more, and numbers in services are going
down while deaths are going up.
We need to ask ourselves why those most at risk are not accessing support,
and the answer has to be that the help on offer is not the right kind. The policy
environment forces services to focus on moving people forward and imposing
ambition on the traumatised.
Until the treatment system remembers how to hold people safely, I worry
that people will continue choosing to take their chances on the street.
