REITOX ACADEMY

Treatment demand indicator

Petra Meier
National Drug Evidence Centre
University of Manchester, UK

The Art of Quality Management

If you want to build a house, the foundation needs to be sound or:
Rubbish IN ------ Rubbish OUT

Data sources

Be sure of what data sources are available in your country (a list of possibilities, which may not be complete) and access data from as many sources as you can. Try to influence the expansion of data collection

Treatment:
Specialist community-based drug services
Outreach/street services
General Practitioners
Residential Rehabilitation Units
Day Care Programmes
Inpatient detoxification services
General Hospitals
Psychiatric wards
Prisons
Criminal justice
Prisons
Arrests
Other
National and local population statistics (eg from census)
Mortality data
Morbidity data
Child protection registers

Decide on core reporters
Invest as much effort as possible to achieve complete coverage for those core reporters
Only change data collection mechanisms if you absolutely must (apart from adding questions to form or switching from paper to electronic format)

Anonymous or Attributor or Named Data

Anonymous data
Attributors (eg initials, date of birth, and gender)
Fully identifiable (names or Health Service Number etc)

Agency Compliance

Know your key contacts at agency level
Give impression that you are available for them
Demonstrate relevance of data to service
Involve key stakeholders for serious problems (or get those people who do the data collection for you to do it)

Validation

Develop a validation routine
Check information for same person year on year
Current and lifetime injecting/sharing
Only one primary drug
No missing attributors

Reporting

National reports for EMCDDA

Basic information to include

• Year
• Study design
• Sample design
• Applied methods
• Instruments used
• Size of the study population
• Age groups covered
• Response rate (especially, if problematic)

Introduction to any reports you produce

• Background to data collection
  - Legal framework
  - Organisational framework
  - Data collection tool
  - Method (incl sources and data flow)
  - Caveats and interpretation guidelines
• Glossary of terms and data/case definitions
  - Case definition
  - Drug use definition
  - Abbreviations
  - Dealing with multiple presentations by the same person
• Contact details

Definitional issues

• Drug use
• Use, abuse, misuse, dependence, problem use, addiction
• Opiates
• Stimulants
• Overdose
• Are you using EMCDDA compliant definitions?
• Treatment service and classification of services

Layout issues

Table/graph titles, legends & captions

• clear without having to refer to the text (obviously need to be present!),
• tell you what is shown, data source, sample size, what area/region is covered

How to get people interested

Reporting needs to be

• RELEVANT
• TIMELY
• COMPETENT

• Flexible local data collection for current information needs, stable core data for trends.
• Timely: Available when needed. Reporting in line with third-party deadlines.
• Competent: only you have local knowledge. Thus: Provide your audience with interpretation guidance.

Who needs what information?

• Europe: epidemiological core datasets on 5 key indicators
• Government: National information on health, criminal justice involvement, morbidity. Possibly pinpointing local differences in service provision, user profiles etc
• Local health & government: Commissioning and policy development, eg Which services/initiatives do we need to develop, for how many people? Are we meeting targets?
• Agencies: How is my agency doing compared to others, have we overlooked that client base has changed in recent years, are we meeting targets?

Reporting sources (UK example)