Government Offers £10 Million in New Funding for Drug Centres

This past January (2014) the government announced a brand-new, £10 million funding package to help drug centres and individual recovery programmes serving clients in England. The funding is expected to go primarily to NHS-based programmes and volunteer organisations who depend on government money to operate.

According to the official government announcement, there is only one catch: service providers must be committed to long-term recovery based on improved patient outcomes. That means an organisation whose main strategy is to put recovering addicts on maintenance medications without any further rehabilitation will likely not convince officials to give them a grant. This money is specifically dedicated to strategies that will help reduce the number of addicts in England.

One look at the current state of government drug rehab centers makes it easy to see why the stipulation has been attached. Take heroin treatment for example. Far too many drug centres are more than willing to put clients on long-term methadone rather than actually putting them through drug rehab clinics. Why would they do this? Because methadone is easy to come by and easy to prescribe. However, long-term methadone therapy is not recovery. It is simply a substitute addiction.

Better Outcomes

The government has devised the new funding as a way to encourage better outcomes among service providers. The financial incentive will hopefully spur them to come up with effective strategies that result in real recovery. However, what if it does not?

There is a real risk that throwing more money at the rehab problem will not solve anything. First of all, there is no guarantee additional funding will follow in the coming years. Any programmes developed in conjunction with the funding will have to be discontinued once the money dries up or continue with an alternate source of funding. This is a big problem, especially where NHS programmes are concerned.

The other danger comes by way of the red tape government programmes are known for. It is very possible that grants could be made with promises of better patient outcomes, yet those outcomes never come to fruition. Such a situation would definitely be money wasted. Let us hope it does not come to that. Let us hope the government plan actually produces real, tangible results.

Private Treatment

Regardless of the outcome of the government funding project, we always have private drug centres we can rely on for effective treatments. Private clinics have been serving drug and alcohol addicts for decades. They generally have higher success rates as well.

Unfortunately, none of the private centres are in line to receive any of the new money. On the one hand that's good; government money often comes with strings attached. However, it is also bad to some extent. Many a good clinic is struggling to survive financially because the cost of care is keeping a portion of their beds empty. A little bit of extra government funding could mean the difference in keeping some of these drug centres open.

What do you think? Will more money really help improve outcomes?