There has been a great deal of debate about illicit drugs in recent weeks. Just before Christmas, we had the House Affairs Committee report, which highlighted the downward trend in recorded drug use over recent years. Earlier this week the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform published their report on legal highs, which recommended a [read the full story…]
The NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre have published their annual report on drug misuse in adults and children, which this year includes a focus on young adults. Headlines from the report include a 58% rise in hospital admissions for drug poisoning in the last 11 years, and a 23% fall in admissions for drug-related mental [read the full story…]
NICE have published a new quality standard aimed at supporting the recovery for adults with drug use disorders, including opioids, cannabis, stimulants and other drugs. This set of documents on drug use disorders now sits beside the existing NICE quality standards on dementia, depression in adults, alcohol dependence and service user experiences of adult mental [read the full story…]
If you work in the NHS, public health or social care, you’ve probably heard of QIPP (Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention), but have you heard of the QIPP collection? It’s a website run by NICE that contains: QIPP case studies – examples of how health and social care staff are improving quality and productivity across [read the full story…]
NICE have published three new public health briefings for local government on Inequalities and population health, the Public Health Outcomes Framework and Alcohol. These documents are aimed at local authorities and their partner organisations in the health and voluntary sectors, in particular those involved with health and wellbeing boards. Local government is preparing to take [read the full story…]
The relationship between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and substance use in children is hotly debated. ADHD symptoms include inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity and conduct disorders, and there’s considerable interest in finding out which of these predicts early substance use. If we have reliable evidence that answers this question we can make informed decisions about treating ADHD and [read the full story…]
NICE have published public health guidance and a new care pathway to help people of South Asian origin who are living in England to stop using traditional South Asian varieties of smokeless tobacco. These publications are focused on people with ancestral links to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan or Sri Lanka and smokeless tobacco products such [read the full story…]
To date, ecstasy use has been very much associated with young people and clubbing, but some research has shown that the environments in which it is taken is now beginning to broaden. Lifetime prevalence rates for the drug are around 10% in the US and 8.6% in the UK according to 2010 EMCDDA estimates. The [read the full story…]
The Government has published its response to the House of Commons Health Select Committee inquiry on the Government’s Alcohol Strategy. The Committee gave a positive welcome overall to the Government’s Alcohol Strategy and it welcomed the decision to introduce a minimum unit price for alcohol. The 4 key recommendations from the report are: The Committee [read the full story…]
We don’t have accurate statistics on the numbers of children living with alcohol misusing parents. It’s estimated that 79,000 babies in England are living with a parent who is classified as a ‘problematic’ drinker (‘hazardous’ or ‘harmful’). The Office of the Children’s Commissioner has published a Rapid Evidence Assessment about the impact that alcohol misuse [read the full story…]
