Last week (12 March 2018), Collective Voice published an infographic setting out six key challenges facing the substance misuse treatment sector. 

Collective Voice is a group of eight voluntary sector organisations who have come together to ensure that the voices of the drug and alcohol treatment sector and those who use our services are represented effectively.

The agencies are Addaction, Blenheim, Change, grow, live, Changing Lives, Cranstoun, DISC, Phoenix Futures and Turning Point. 

Here’s their accompanying press release:

A perfect storm is brewing. Years of austerity, the degradation of public services, sluggish growth and falling wages are all contributing to increasing pressures on the poor and vulnerable in society. Drug and alcohol problems rarely sit in isolation; all too often they are tied up with an array of complex issues such as mental health, unemployment, homelessness, domestic violence and social deprivation. In the midst of all this, the drug and alcohol treatment system is under increasing strain and is facing a cocktail of different challenges. We set out six of them below. All of these will need to be tackled if the ambitions set out in the Government’s 2017 Drug Strategy are to be realised, and if we are to halt the record levels of drug-related deaths witnessed last year.

Mark Gilman has already suggested a seventh – rapid access to Opioid Substitute Treatment (OST) to prevent another opioid epidemic.

Do you have a challenge to add?