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Lack of NHS treatment for young peoples addiction problems

Whilst the media expresses horror at the pictures of intoxicated youngsters they frequently publish, little reference is made to the lack of NHS treatment available for young people with addiction problems. Britain’s only specialist residential detox centre for young people, Middlegate in Lincolnshire, closed down in 2010 after 15 years.

The closure of Middlegate was part of a trend which has seen the decimation of Britain’s residential detox centres. Roughly a quarter of clinics shut down because of “insufficient referrals” between 2008 and 2010, leaving less than 1,900 beds across the country. Currently, about half of all rehab beds lay empty as NHS trusts, drug agencies, social services, and the police seem increasingly reluctant to send addicts for treatment which is regarded as too expensive.

The closures, empty beds, and apparent lack of need for residential rehab have occurred despite an estimated 330,000 problem drug users in England who cost society more than £15billion a year in drug-related crime, benefits and health services. Instead, the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA) spends more than £700 million on community services, which by and large involves methadone prescriptions and fortnightly meetings with a drug worker.

The problem, to some extent, is one of words and priorities. For the NTA, a satisfactory treatment could mean the person has stopped using one drug but continues to use others. In the words of Deidre Boyd, chief executive of the Addiction Recovery Foundation, “this is the equivalent of saying that an alcoholic has successfully completed treatment because he is free of whisky, but is now dependent on vodka”. The NTA continues to push community services, despite evidence that an individual in residential treatment is seven times more likely to become drug free than an individual in a methadone community project.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) makes recommendations about which treatments are cost-effective for the NHS to use in England. In 2007, it said that residential rehab should only be provided to drug users after every community option has been exhausted. However, this means that people are far more damaged and desperate by the time they eventually get rehab, meaning it will often take longer to treat the person than if they had accessed a residential detox centre initially.

As Amanda Thomas, director of the Western Counselling recovery programme, points out, “If people were dying waiting to get treatment for any other condition it would be a national scandal, but the discrimination against addiction means that it’s OK for them”. Sadly, it seems that most individuals are having to turn to privately funded care in order to see results.

References:

In the Media: “Rehab Needs a Fix”. www.addictiontoday.org

Published by on 25/01/2012.

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