Seòmar agus comataidhean

The UK clinical guidelines for alcohol treatment (UKCGAT) will help to influence the national specification and subsequent overarching guidance for alcohol treatment in Scotland through looking to introduce new approaches to treatment and will apply to a broad range of settings including primary care, hospital and justice settings.

The UKCGAT aims to develop a clear consensus on good practice and help services to implement interventions for alcohol use disorders that are recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). The intention is to promote and support consistent good practice and improve the quality-of-service provision, resulting in better outcomes, similarly to the Orange Book supporting treatment for drugs misuse and dependency.

Residential rehabilitation services in Scotland are regulated by appropriate governing bodies independent of the Scottish Government; namely the Care Inspectorate, Healthcare Improvement Scotland or the NHS.

It is the responsibility of these bodies to monitor and ensure that residential rehabilitation services are providing safe, quality support to people in recovery across the country.

The Scottish Government are working with regulators and providers to develop and publish a series of “Principles for Residential Rehabilitation” to support regulatory bodies with their evaluation of RR providers, and to empower individuals to understand what they should expect from a stay in residential rehab, including pre-rehab support and appropriate aftercare.

No - we have set out a clear definition of what counts as residential rehabilitation and used it consistently since its publication in 2021.

The Scottish Government uses the Residential Rehabilitation Development Working Group definition of residential rehab as "facilities offering programmes which aim to support individuals to attain an alcohol or drug-free lifestyle and to be re-integrated into society, provide intensive psychosocial support and a structured programme of daily activities, and which residents are required to attend over a fixed period of time."

We have asked Public Health Scotland (PHS) to investigate the reasons behind the apparent 40% reduction in the number of people accessing specialist alcohol treatment services. We will use this information to better understand the reasons for treatment number decline and how we can improve and better support alcohol treatment services in Scotland.

We are aware of two alcohol death reviews that have been conducted since 2020. These were completed by the Borders Alcohol and Drug Partnership and NHS Fife.

Alcohol death reviews are a valuable practice for Alcohol and Drug Partnerships to undertake in order to gain a deeper and more detailed understanding of the circumstances surrounding alcohol-specific deaths. To assess to what extent the people who have died were in touch with local services, what interventions had taken place, whether there is an identifiable profile of the people who are suffering an alcohol-specific death and whether there are lessons that can be learned, changes or improvements that can be made to services to prevent future deaths in the local area.

Every life lost to alcohol is a tragedy and the recent alcohol specific deaths statistics published by the National Records of Scotland is a stark reminder of the challenge we continue to face in tackling alcohol harm across Scotland.

The Scottish Government continues to prevent alcohol harm including continuing and increasing the minimum unit price of alcohol. Minimum unit pricing has been estimated to have saved hundreds of lives since it was first implemented in 2018 and the steps taken by this Government are expected to continue and increase the positive health effects of the policy. The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care has also set out the next steps for progressing work on alcohol marketing, which also seeks to develop further preventative approaches to reducing alcohol harm.

To support people already drinking at hazardous and harmful levels the Scottish Government provided record investment to ADPs in the 2024-2025 financial year. In addition to this we are currently developing a national treatment specification for alcohol treatment in Scotland which will look to build on the work of the forthcoming UK Clinical Guidelines for Alcohol Treatment. The Scottish Government also supports innovation to develop best practice on tackling alcohol harm including projects such as the Managed Alcohol Programme and the Primary Care Alcohol Nurse Outreach Service which has recently been embedded into mainstream services in Glasgow City ADP.

The then Minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing issued a letter to Alcohol and Drug Partnerships (ADPs) supporting the release of Alcohol Focus Scotland’s guidance on undertaking alcohol death reviews on 24 September 2020. The letter asked that ADPs undertake an alcohol death review every three years.

The National Mission was established to improve and save lives of people impacted by drugs. However, given that many of the improvements to services, such as residential rehabilitation, included as part of the Mission are integrated for both alcohol and drugs, the work of the Mission has always been helping save and improve the lives of people impacted by alcohol as well. There is also a significant cohort of people whose lives have been impacted by both alcohol and drugs.