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Drug Misuse: treatment

The Scottish Government, NHS boards, local authorities and voluntary sector organisations provide a range of treatment options for people who experience problems related to drug misuse. In addition, 30 Drug Action Teams (now Alcohol and Drug Partnerships (ADPs)) across Scotland form the focal point for local action on drug misuse, and receive strong support from the Scottish Government. There are around 300 agencies offering a range of treatment and care to substance misusers in Scotland. These agencies supply anonymised information about new clients to the Scottish Drug Misuse Database (SDMD).

From April 2006, changes to the SDMD data collection mean that trend information cannot be presented and figures are not directly comparable with those previously published on the SMR24 form. For further information on this, see ‘background information’ in Drug Misuse Statistics Scotland 2008

  • In 2007/08, 12,562 new individuals were reported to the SDMD. This corresponds to a rate of 259 per 100,000 of the Scottish population (ISD 2008). In this year, around a third (36%) of new clients self-referred to services for their drug problem and a further third (34%) were referred by a GP

Since 2004, drug treatment services in Scotland have routinely collected data on waiting times. The data is submitted to ADPs, who are responsible for assuring data quality and these teams feed the data into local databases, which generate summary reports each quarter. The summary reports are then sent to Information Services Division, where they are collated, aggregated, and then published on the ISD drugs misuse website.

A national HEAT (Health improvement, Efficiency, Access, Treatment) target set by the Scottish Government states that ‘by March 2013, 90% of people who need help with their drug problem will wait no longer than three weeks for treatment. As a first step to this target it is expected that by December 2010, 90% of clients will be offered an assessment date that falls within 4 weeks of the referral date and 90% of clients will be offered a treatment date that falls within 4 weeks of the assessment date. Progress against this target can by measured by the latest Drug Treatment Waiting Times Information Framework Report July-Sept 2009.

Please note: If you require the most up-to-date data available, please check the data sources directly as new data may have been published since these data pages were last updated. Although we endeavour to ensure that the data pages are kept up-to-date, there may be a time lag between new data being published and the relevant ScotPHO web pages being updated.