Ian Austin – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Ian Austin on 2016-10-07.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how much his Department has spent on providing heroin to heroin addicts in line with his Department’s policy set out on page 31 of the Modern Crime Prevention Strategy, published by his predecessor in March 2016.
Nicola Blackwood
As outlined in the Government’s Modern Crime Prevention Strategy, the use of injectable diamorphine as part of treatment for a small cohort of entrenched, long-term opiate users can be effective.
On behalf of the Department, Public Health England managed a pilot programme of supervised injectable diamorphine prescribing at a cost of £2 million per annum. The pilot ran from 2012 to 2015 at: South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in Southwark, London; Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust in Brighton; and Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust in Easington, County Durham.
Information about expenditure on diamorphine prescribing for the treatment of dependence, sites where it is available outside this pilot, and how much diamorphine has been prescribed to heroin addicts is not collected centrally. The decision to commission and fund the local provision of diamorphine prescribing is for local authorities.
