Reducing Ill-Health, Hospitalisation & Death among People who Use Drugs

About this Event

Join Drug Research Network Scotland for a half-day seminar with Dan Lewer (Public Health Registrar and NIHR Doctoral Research Fellow at University College London).

Dan's work seeks to understand the physical health of people who use heroin and/or crack cocaine and identify ways to improve access to the NHS. People who use drugs have raised risk of long-term conditions such as respiratory, cardiovascular and liver disease. However, there are few initiatives to try and improve diagnosis and treatment, and physical health problems cause a large amount of suffering and avoidable deaths.

At this event Dan will:

• Share learning from his published work on physical health inequalities, hospital admissions, deaths and healthcare utilisation among people who use drugs.
• Present his research into the unmet physical health needs of people who use heroin and crack cocaine and outline aspects of healthcare that need to be improved most urgently.
• Discuss opportunities to address these inequalities by engaging drug and alcohol services to co-design models of care with those most at risk.

There will be time for delegates to share information and learning from similar projects underway in Scotland, and discuss implications for Scottish research, policy and practice.

This event will be of interest to policy makers, service planners and providers, recovery communities, academic and other researchers and people with lived experience of drug use.