Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
Very helpful update from the national intelligence network on the health harms associated with drug use with a focus on drug-related deaths and peer harm reduction.
Public Health England’s annual health and justice review highlights specific health needs of women and older prisoners.
Public Health England report celebrates English drug treatment system but avoids question of why our long-term recovery rates remain so low.
Latest Public Health England figures give a profile of young people in drug and alcohol treatment and show a further drop in overall numbers.
Public Health England report details the impact of alcohol on our health service and society generally and argues for the introduction of a minimum unit price.
Annual Health and Justice report from Public Health England sets goal of putting health at the heart of prison reform.
Public Health England has just updated its two good practice guides for commissioning drug and alcohol prevention, treatment and recovery services.
The growth of service users’ involvement in the design and delivery of drug and alcohol services has made a big contribution to the evolution of those services so that they are more user-friendly and more likely to result in significant positive change for the people who use them.
The PHE report summarises our understanding of smoking in prison. On the one hand, limited access to tobacco can reduce how much and how often prisoners smoke as can the cost of tobacco for those surviving on a prison income.
Conversely, smoking is often seen as a coping strategy to manage the stress of imprisonment and helps to alleviate boredom. Not smoking in a culture where a large majority of people smoke can also be socially isolating. And, of course “Burn” remains one of the principal prison currencies.
One third of commissioners expected to reduce spending on residential treatment and it’s hard not to think that this would be a much higher figure if the survey had been done after the Chancellor’s recent statement about unprecedented cuts in public services. It seems that the future of drug and alcohol residential treatment is at best uncertain and at worst likely to shrink considerably.
In its response to the review, DrugScope, representing service providers, expressed a concern about the current volatility of funding. Drugscope highlighted PHE ADPH drugs alcohol commissioning 2014 the continuous drive to reassess and retender services, and the need for commissioners to understand the impact frequent tendering processes have on providers (see this post for an alternative model).
