Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether her Department is collating data from toxicology reports of non-fatal overdose incidents to assess the risk from synthetic opioids.

The Government is undertaking a number of actions to address the risk that synthetic opioids pose. The Department has a longstanding surveillance system in place to collect information on the nature and location of novel drug use, drug markets, and reports alerting us to drug harms experienced. We continue to monitor the threat posed by synthetic opioids, and are working to improve drug surveillance on synthetic opioids through the development of an early warning system. This will include, with the permission of coroners, toxicology results for fatal overdose cases from across England as soon as the information is available, enabling the Department to closely monitor the substances causing deaths.

We know that most overdoses take place when individuals are alone, or accompanied by others also using drugs. This means they are largely transitory and hidden events, with no opportunity for sampling. A key indicator, therefore, is those who do come into contact with first responders, who are administered the lifesaving opioid reversal drug naloxone, or who are admitted to hospital. Ambulance data represents an opportunity for rapidly identifying local spikes in overdoses and, for this purpose, we are establishing data feeds with ambulance trusts in England, on callouts where naloxone has been administered.