Alcoholism and Drugs: Rehabilitation
(asked on 7th December 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to (a) increase the number of places and (b) reduce the waiting time for NHS funded drug and alcohol rehabilitation services.
Local authorities are responsible for assessing local needs and commissioning drug and alcohol prevention, treatment and harm reduction services to meet these needs. Local authority spending through the public health grant will be maintained in the next financial year, meaning local authorities can continue to invest in prevention and essential frontline health services and this includes drug and alcohol treatment and recovery services. The Government will set out further significant action that it is taking to improve the population’s health in the coming months.
National statistics on adult alcohol and drug treatment between April 2019 and March 2020 were published on 26 November 2020 and show that of the people starting treatment, 98% did so within three weeks of referral to treatment. These statistics are available at the following link:
The Second Phase of Dame Carol Black’s independent review on drugs focuses on prevention, treatment services and recovery. The recommendations will be made available to ministers in due course and will feed into wider government work to tackle the serious harms caused by substance misuse, including through increasing access to services.