2026-04-14T06:51:04Zhttps://recercat.cat/oai/requestoai:recercat.cat:2445/1109352025-12-05T01:16:34Zcom_2072_1057col_2072_478917
Monitoring quality and coverage of harm reduction services for
people who use drugs: a consensus study
Wiessing, Lucas
Ferri, Marica
Belackova, Vendula
Carrieri, Patrizia
Friedman, Samuel R.
Folch, Cinta
Dolan, Kate
Galvin, Brian
Vickerman, Peter
Lazarus, Jeffrey V.
Mravcik, Viktor
Kretzschmar, Mirjam
Sypsa, Vana
Sarasa-Renedo, Ana
Uusküla, Anneli
Paraskevis, Dimitrios
Mendao, Luis
Rossi, Diana
Gelder, Nadine van
Mitcheson, Luke
Paoli, Letizia
Diaz Gomez, Cristina
Milhet, Maitena
Dascalu, Nicoleta
Knight, Jonathan
Hay, Gordon
Kalamara, Eleni
Simon, Roland
Comiskey, Catherine
Rossi, Carla
Griffiths, Paul
Drogoaddicció
Epidemiology
Drogoaddictes
Drug addiction
Epidemiologia
Drug addicts
BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Despite advances in our knowledge of
effective services for people who use drugs over the last
decades globally, coverage remains poor in most countries, while
quality is often unknown. This paper aims to discuss the
historical development of successful epidemiological indicators
and to present a framework for extending them with additional
indicators of coverage and quality of harm reduction services,
for monitoring and evaluation at international, national or
subnational levels. The ultimate aim is to improve these
services in order to reduce health and social problems among
people who use drugs, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, crime and legal problems,
overdose (death) and other morbidity and mortality. METHODS AND
RESULTS: The framework was developed collaboratively using
consensus methods involving nominal group meetings, review of
existing quality standards, repeated email commenting rounds and
qualitative analysis of opinions/experiences from a broad range
of professionals/experts, including members of civil society and
organisations representing people who use drugs. Twelve priority
candidate indicators are proposed for opioid agonist therapy
(OAT), needle and syringe programmes (NSP) and generic
cross-cutting aspects of harm reduction (and potentially other
drug) services. Under the specific OAT indicators, priority
indicators included 'coverage', 'waiting list time', 'dosage'
and 'availability in prisons'. For the specific NSP indicators,
the priority indicators included 'coverage', 'number of
needles/syringes distributed/collected', 'provision of other
drug use paraphernalia' and 'availability in prisons'. Among the
generic or cross-cutting indicators the priority indicators were
'infectious diseases counselling and care', 'take away
naloxone', 'information on safe use/sex' and 'condoms'. We
discuss conditions for the successful development of the
suggested indicators and constraints (e.g. funding, ideology).
We propose conducting a pilot study to test the feasibility and
applicability of the proposed indicators before their scaling up
and routine implementation, to evaluate their effectiveness in
comparing service coverage and quality across countries.
CONCLUSIONS: The establishment of an improved set of validated
and internationally agreed upon best practice indicators for
monitoring harm reduction service will provide a structural
basis for public health and epidemiological studies and support
evidence and human rights-based health policies, services and
interventions.
2017-05-12T11:57:15Z
2017-05-12T11:57:15Z
2017-04-22
2017-05-03T18:01:52Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
1477-7517
https://hdl.handle.net/2445/110935
28431584
eng
Reproducció del document publicat a:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12954-017-0141-6
Harm Reduction Journal, 2017, vol. 14, num. 1, p. 19
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12954-017-0141-6
cc by (c) Wiessing et al., 2017
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
14 p.
application/pdf
Biomed Central
Articles publicats en revistes (ISGlobal)