Nurse office and Consumption room. To implement a Drug Consumption Room (DCR) in a scheduled drug service.

Antoni Llort Suárez, Edu Beas Colodro, Pili Vidal Massot, Enda Barberà Magano, Meri Cortasa Sadurní, Ana López Pérez

The Servei d’Addicions i Salut Mental de Reus (SAdSM), is the public service in Reus area that attends people with problems that involve drug use, and mental illness related with that uses.
We provide information, injection material and medicines, and very often, some patients use drugs in the hospital area, because in the same area is common to find the substances they will use.
We thought in the possibility of making some change in this situation, trying to let some space inside the nurse office, to avoid people consuming in the surroundings, avoiding also the risk of accidents and overdose.
To implement a DCR in the timetable of our activity wasn’t easy to arrange, but we decided to dedicate some of the scheduled time as a test, to raise a proper consumption room in the future. We took just one hour per day, to check if it could be useful.
The first weeks, some patients got interested, and they used de DCR, but the limited time we destined wasn’t helpful to keep their use. Most of them asked for a wider time to be opened everyday, some of them found it a bad idea, to host the DCR in the same therapeutic space they use in the follow-up.

Disadvantages:
- The short time the DCR is open everyday
- The professional responsible for the DCR is someone that also is responsible in the follow-up of the patients
- Administration difficulties (economy, legality)
Current aims:
- To create a proper space for a DCR, with a more wide schedule.
- To get the administrative permissions to be allowed (once the activities has started, would we easier).
- To get to know the users the benefits of using the DCR instead of their street points.