Tag: health
Talking recovery in North Edinburgh
An opportunity to grow a recovery community on Tuesday 16 June – and there’s free pizza too …
Blanket ban on ‘legal highs’
‘Sadly, too many have paid the ultimate price from taking these risky substances and this change will go a long way to stop further deaths’ – Maryon Stewart, Angelus Foundation
Action to protect young people from the dangers of so-called ‘legal highs’ and target those who profit from their trade was announced by the UK government today.
The Psychoactive Substances Bill will prohibit and disrupt the production, distribution, sale and supply of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in the UK. They are often sold online or on the high street.
The ban will extend to the sale of nitrous oxide for human use, known as ‘laughing gas’ or ‘hippy crack’, although its legitimate sale will not be affected.
Minister of State for Policing, Crime, Criminal Justice and Victims, Mike Penning, said: “Young people who take these substances are taking exceptional risks with their health and those who profit from their sale have a complete disregard for the potential consequences. That’s why we are targeting the suppliers.
“The landmark bill will fundamentally change the way we tackle new psychoactive substances – and put an end to the game of cat and mouse in which new drugs appear on the market more quickly than government can identify and ban them.
“The blanket ban will give police and other law enforcement agencies greater powers to tackle the reckless trade in psychoactive substances, instead of having to take a substance-by-substance approach.”
The government has already taken a range of action against so-called ‘legal highs’, including banning more than 500 new drugs and creating the Forensic Early Warning System to detect substances not seen before in the UK. There is also ongoing work to enhance the response to prevention, treatment and information sharing.
Last year the government established an expert panel on New Psychoactive Substances to look at ways of further enhancing the enforcement response. Having carefully considered the evidence, ministers decided to act on the panel’s recommendation to explore the feasibility of a blanket ban and are now introducing this new legislation.
Under the Bill:
- it will be an offence to produce, supply, offer to supply, possess with intent to supply, import or export psychoactive substances; that is, any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect. The maximum sentence will be seven years’ imprisonment.
- all of the UK will be affected by the blanket ban and law enforcement powers would be extended to all NPS supply from UK websites, so they can be shut down.
- substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, food and medical products, will be excluded from the scope of the offence, as will controlled drugs, which will continue to be regulated by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.
- there will be powers to seize and destroy NPS and powers to search persons, premises and vehicles, as well as to enter and search premises by warrant if necessary.
- similar to the legislation introduced in Ireland, it will also capture substances that, although not new, are psychoactive, have been used as intoxicants for many years and are not harm free.
- there will be provision for civil sanctions – prohibition notices and prohibition orders – to enable the police and local authorities to adopt a proportionate response to the supply of NPS in appropriate cases.
In 2013, there were 120 deaths involving NPS in England, Scotland and Wales.
National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for New Psychoactive Substances, Commander Simon Bray said: “When people buy dangerous drugs they will generally have little idea how potent the drug is or what it may contain. Sadly we have seen too many people losing their lives or becoming seriously ill after taking so-called “legal highs” under the impression that they are safe.
“A blanket ban on new psychoactive substances (NPS) will make it simpler for law enforcement to deal with those drugs which are potentially unsafe but which may not yet be controlled.”
Founder of the Angelus Foundation, Maryon Stewart, said: “Angelus very much welcomes these important legal changes on restricting the supply of so called ‘legal highs’ or new psychoactive substances.
“We expect the law to impact very significantly on the high street trade. The open sale of NPS has led to dangerous experimentation with many young people being badly affected by their unpredictable effects and some ending up in hospital.
“Sadly, too many have paid the ultimate price from taking these risky substances and this change will go a long way to stop further deaths.
“No law can offer the perfect solution to protect people from drugs; it is equally vital we all concentrate our efforts of making the public, young people in particular, more aware of the harms of these substances in schools, at university and during festivals.”
Edinburgh gets set for Festival of Cycling
City to host third Festival of Cycling from 11 – 21 June
The third Edinburgh Festival of Cycling will be held from 11 to 21 June, and Scotland’s greatest cycling celebration promises to be a real showcase of all aspects of bicycle culture.
The jam-packed 10-day programme features not only bike rides and races, but talks, films, drama, art & photography exhibitions, family events, and workshops. Among the rides there are several new rides, including the inauguration of the Capital Trail a long distance mountain biking challenge, and two new Audax rides aimed at beginners and families. There will also be rides and events for children and families.
The festival will feature inspiring speakers such as: Shannon Galpin, National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, talking about her work in Afghanistan using the bicycle as a vehicle for social justice. Juliana Buhring (the fastest woman to cycle round the world) will be giving a Q&A after the Scottish première of ‘Inspired to Ride’ the new film about the 4,233 mile Trans America race, in which was the first woman to finish (and fifth overall). Also, new at the Festival is the powerful new drama ‘The White Bike’ by Tamara von Werthern, who was inspired to write the play by the death of Eilidh Cairns who was killed as she cycled to work.
This years Festival of Cycling will see the return of the Original Edinburgh Night Ride, for its third year: this is a supported ride which has been described as a magical mystery tour from Edinburgh to East Lothian and back through the mid-summer night – this ride sold out for the last two years.
Then there’s the Bike Curious Family workshop – showing families how bikes can be the perfect transport solution for children of all ages. Also, returning this year is Women’s Cycle forum, an evening of discussion, inspiration and networking on how to build a better world.
In addition to all this there will be plenty more to do including a literary tour, rides and tours for all-abilities, novice riders, children and the elite, workshops, exhibitions of art & photography, various workshops, including one where you can build a bicycle from scratch using bamboo to make the frame, and public meetings.
Throughout June, ‘Pedalling past: Edinburgh’s Cycling Heritage’, explores Edinburgh’s cycling heritage in a free exhibition at the Central Library, through historic photographs and other material from the collections of Edinburgh Libraries and Museums and Galleries.
The Festival also caters to the increasing amount of people commuting in Edinburgh. The Spokes’ Bike Breakfast will be free to all who arrive by bike and features a range of stalls, speeches, security marking and servicing for bikes at the Edinburgh City Chambers. The Brompton Fold-Fest will have prizes for the quickest in town to fold a Brompton bicycle at Biketrax and at the SEStran Commuter Challenge participants will set off from Ferrytoll, Ingliston, Straiton and Newcraighall by car, bus, train, tram, bicycle, or jogging/walking and head for St Andrew Square, to see which mode is the fastest and causes the least environmental damage.
Louise Haston, Commonwealth Games double Silver medallist said: “Over the past few years cycling in Scotland has gone from strength to strength and it’s great to see events such as the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling taking place,
especially for the 3rd year running.
“Events like this are key to getting people of all ages and abilities involved in cycling whether it be for sport, leisure, to stay fit or have fun! There are some fantastic events on this year’s calendar – I can’t wait to be involved!”
Director of the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling, Kim Harding, says “This year we are bringing you our strongest programme yet: more rides, including the new Capital Trail and two new Audax rides. More films, including the première of ‘Inspired to Ride’ with a Q&A with one of the stars. Great talks, such as ‘Pedalling a Revolution’ by Shannon Galpin, founder of the nonprofit organisation Mountain2Mountain, on her social justice work in Afghanistan, a country where there is a cultural taboo against women and girls riding bicycles.
“Also, Emily Chappell a cycle courier taking on the world, and Swiss mountain biker Gian Liesch. The powerful new drama ‘The White Bike’ by Tamara von Werthern, plus books, photographs, workshops, rides and more. Did I mention the rides?”
Held across different venues around Edinburgh, more information on all events of the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling and tickets are available online at www.edfoc.org.uk.
The Festival can also be followed on Twitter at @edfoc, on Facebook at EdinburghFestivalofCycling, on Instagram at @edfoc and on Flickr at edincyclefest. The hashtag for the event is #edfoc2015.
The Edinburgh Festival of Cycling is supported by Sustrans, Sestran, The City of Edinburgh Council, Spokes and the Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative. Booking information and contact details for all events can be found on www.edfoc.org.uk, the online brochure can be browsed at goo.gl/TYrM6z.
Healthy Hibee Scott tackles diabetes head on
‘Around 4% of the population of Lothian have diabetes – which although is a life-long condition, as Scott has proved, it does not need to stop you living a full and normal life’ – Dr Alan Jaap
Hibernian midfield star Scott Allan inspired young people with diabetes at a special event at Easter Road on Monday. Scott was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a child, and the recently-named SPFL Championship Player of the Year is the perfect person to prove that the condition need not stand in the way of a successful sporting career.
The event, the first in a series of health promotion activities planned by the Hibernian Community Foundation and NHS Lothian, saw around 100 children who have been diagnosed with diabetes and their families hear Scott talk about how he manages his condition as a sportsman.
Scott said: “I am delighted to be asked to provide positive messages to young people with diabetes. If they can draw some extra energy from meeting with me and having a conversation about how I manage my diabetes then that is fantastic. The fact that so many people want to come along is really humbling.”
Leeann Dempster, Chief Executive of Hibernian FC and a Director of the Hibernian Community Foundation, said: “Scott is a high profile professional athlete and sportsman who has managed to build a successful career despite being diagnosed with diabetes.
“He manages the condition very successfully, even during matches, and because of the help and support he has received is keen to help children and young people with diabetes understand the condition, how it can be managed better, and how much can be achieved despite it. Scott approached us to say he was keen to help in any way that he could, and to raise awareness of diabetes.”
Dr. Alan Jaap, Consultant in Diabetes, NHS Lothian, said: “Around 4% of the population of Lothian have diabetes – which although is a life-long condition, as Scott has proved, it does not need to stop you living a full and normal life. I’m sure Scott will act as an inspiration and positive role model for all of the youngsters attending.”
Scott has always had to consider his type 1 diabetes when playing football – his diagnosis came when he was just three-years-old, and he learned how to manage his condition playing football at school.
Diabetes should be no barrier to young people considering a career in sport, Scott insists. “As long as you manage your diabetes you can do whatever you want”, he said. “There have been a lot of athletes throughout the years that have been at the top of the game with diabetes. You need to live as much of a normal life as possible – don’t let people tell you otherwise.”
The event is part of ‘Healthy Hibs Messages’ – a series of health promotion events undertaken as part of the new GameChanger Public Social Partnership, the first Public Social Partnership launched by a football club in Scotland, and supported by Hibernian FC, Hibernian Community Foundation and NHS Lothian. This unique partnership has seen more than 70 different organisations signing up to work together with the joint aim of making Scotland’s population healthier.
Ebola: one year on
Yesterday marked the anniversary of the first reported case of Ebola in Sierra Leone. International Development Secretary Justine Greening said:
“A year ago today it was confirmed that the deadly Ebola virus had reached Sierra Leone. In the months that followed this terrible disease swept across the country claiming thousands of lives, devastating communities and temporarily crippling the economy.
“The UK can be immensely proud of its life saving work leading the international humanitarian response in Sierra Leone. Working hand in hand with the government of Sierra Leone and its people, we have supported them through every step of this disease — setting up labs to quickly diagnose Ebola, raising awareness about how the disease is spread, building treatment centres, training frontline health workers, and funding teams to provide safe and dignified burials. The number of cases has now fallen from a peak of over 500 a week in November to just 8 last week. We won’t have won this battle until we get to zero infections and stamp out Ebola. We will continue to work with Sierra Leone’s government and local communities to seek out and isolate every new case.
“There is no room for complacency, but we hope that the end is in sight. The UK will continue to stand by Sierra Leone until the job is done but it is vital that others now join us to help Sierra Leone get back on its feet. UK support will help get health and education services up and running, kick start the economy and protect the people most affected by the disease — including the children who lost their families. We cannot wipe out the suffering this disease has inflicted but we can help to build a stronger, more prosperous Sierra Leone that is better prepared to tackle disease outbreaks in the future.”
New bus stops at Royal Infirmary
Two new bus stops will open at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh from tomorrow (Monday 25 May). The new routes will see buses coming from town, and out of town. travelling through the site.
One of the new stops will be located on Little France Crescent, with the other situated between the University of Edinburgh Chancellor’s Building and the University of Edinburgh Queen’s Medical Research Institute (click here for large map).
The main bus terminal moved from the West to East side of the site in May 2014 and the loop road, which runs around the site, has now been redeveloped to allow buses to pass through.
This development forms part of a programme of works which have been carried out to prepare the site for the new £150 million Royal Hospital for Sick Children and Department of Clinical Neurosciences.
Work started on the new hospital in early 2015 and the new building is anticipated to open to patients in autumn 2017.
Brian Currie, Project Director, Royal Hospital for Sick Children and Department of Clinical Neurosciences said: “The majority of the road works have now been completed and I would like to thank patients, visitors and the public for their understanding as these developments have taken place.
“The new hospital will conjoin the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh via a link building between both adult and child Emergency Departments. This link building will run across Little France Crescent and therefore the need to reconfigure the bus routes has been an important part of the construction programme.
“We would again like to thank you for your understanding as construction of the new hospital and work to redevelop departments within the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh continues.”
www.nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk/riecampus for more details.
Give blood in Blackhall
The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service are asking donors to make an extra special effort to give blood at St Columba’s Parish Church on Hillhouse Road tomorrow (Tuesday).
Sessions run from 2.30 – 4pm in the afternoon
and there’s an evening session from 5.30 – 8pm.
If you are not sure if you are eligible to donate, call 0845 30 17 270
email NSS.snbtsenquiry@nhs.net
or call in to speak to a member of staff at one of the sessions.
Local learners on a high!
Local young people short-listed for learners award
Late last year I spent time with a bright and enthusiastic group of young adults at Royston Wardieburn Community Centre to plan a piece of work. Their mission? To choose a subject of relevance to young people, research and then write an article on that subject for North Edinburgh News.
The group has now produced their article (see below) – and all their hard work is to be recognised too!
Community Learning & Development tutor Karen Riddell, who supported the group during the project, explained: “They really were a vibrant group of young people with strong opinions and it was great to see them engage with the topic and undertake the various activities related to building their skills and putting the article together.
“The group was nominated for an Edinburgh Adult Learners Achievement Award and I’m delighted to say that they have been short-listed for an award in the Young Adults Category.”
The Tomorrow’s People team will learn their fate at an event at the City Chambers on 20 May. Fingers crossed for you, guys – and here’s your article …
LEGAL HIGHS: Is It Worth It?
Local young people speak out against ‘legal highs’
We are a group of young people from Pilton who have just spent 16 weeks on the Tomorrow’s People employability programme. Part of our course helped us brush up on our literacy and critical thinking skills through a weekly CLD Practical Journalism course held at Royston Wardieburn Community Centre.
Dave Pickering, the editor at the North Edinburgh News, very kindly gave us the opportunity to write an article for his paper, so after much debate we decided to research and write about Legal Highs.
We compiled a local survey and found out that most of the young people who responded to the survey had either used Legal Highs or knew someone who had. The main reasons cited were: they were easy to get, friends were trying them, they’re cheap – at least half the price of illegal drugs, they give you a really good high, taking them gives you something to do, boredom and peer pressure.
Even although a high percentage of young people surveyed had used them without any serious long term consequences, we did find out that at least 68 people died last year as a direct result of using them, so they are not quite as harmless as some people think.
We found that their name made them quite misleading and people thought it meant they were pretty safe to use. The truth is that drugs councilors now advise their clients to stick to their heroin as legal highs are even more dangerous, burning the skin as it is injected and causing blistering and serious infection.
Most people who completed the questionnaire had also tried illegal drugs and strongly felt that these were safer than Legal highs. As a group, we definitely agreed with that.
We also feel that the government are failing to make drug taking safer. No matter what you might feel about drugs, a lot of people from literally all walks of life use them and are going to continue to do so. David Cameron dodges the issue for fear of losing votes and insists that ‘What is in place is working’ despite the fact that over 2500 people died from drugs-related causes last year in the UK.
Is it not time to follow Portugal and make drugs a health issue rather than a criminal one so that people are offered more protection? In Portugal they found that de-criminalising it didn’t bring about any increase in the level of drug use by people and also that millions was saved on the essentially ineffectual enforcement of drug laws.
Across Europe clubs have drug-testing facilities so that people can test substances before they take them – surely that must offer people more protection than kidding on that ‘what is in place is working’!
A recent Home Office report that we looked at said that having tough drugs laws didn’t make any difference to the level of drug use but Home Secretary Teresa May had this part of the report removed and it was only found out about when Norman Baker revealed the findings after he resigned! This just goes to show that governments make useless drug laws to kid on they are in control of the problem when they’re really just doing it as a vote catcher.
Present policy bears no relation to the reality of people’s recreational drug use and it’s time for the government to introduce some new policies to protect its citizens and not put their own vote-catching first.
We need much better drug education to help us keep ourselves safe, and the obvious place for this to take place is in schools. We felt strongly that a peer to peer support programme in schools would help young people make informed choices about drug use and help keep them safer.
Our research found that young people felt there needed to be far more opportunities for young people in the work-place and much better affordable or subsidised recreational facilities to offer them the chance to experience other kinds of ‘legal highs’, their own ‘natural highs’ like ski-ing, skating, abseiling, snow-boarding, canoeing, dirt-biking, go-karting etc. Risk-taking is part of brain-development for young people and we need to offer them the opportunity to explore this in a safer environment.
Drugs become a problem when there is little else in the drug users lives. We found out that in an experiment, mice which were separated from other mice kept going back to drink the drug-laced water whereas mice that lived in groups didn’t. The experiment showed that lack of strong emotional bonds in your life can drive you to bond with legal highs or drugs instead.
They say it takes a community to bring up a child so that’s why it’s very important for us to work together to stop the reckless experimentation that can lead to addiction, to value the young people of Pilton and provide them with the support they need to keep their use of drugs and alcohol to an acceptable level and help them realise their potential.
It seems to us that one of the worst thing about legal highs is the hypocrisy of supposedly ‘respectable’ shop-keepers who are prepared to stock them in the full knowledge that people, especially young people, buy them to consume them. We feel a local campaign should be set up to stop these shops from selling them.
Good websites:
(1)Anyone’s Child; Families for Safer Drug Control – www.anyoneschild.org
(2) Release.org
Food conference follow-up tomorrow
Taking the next steps forward to tackle food poverty
Pilton Community Health Project recently produced a report on December’s ‘Good Food for All’ conference which focused on food poverty in North Edinburgh.
http://pchp.org.uk/sites/default/files/resource/files/Good%20food%20for%20all%20final%20report.pdf
The report identifies a number of issues that we, as people living and working in the community, cannot solve ourselves. We need action on policy issues
Particularly:
– Living wages
– Job creation and security
– Social security and the punitive sanctions regime
– Better recognition of the contribution that this local community makes towards improving its own food culture and access to affordable, fresh, healthy food and further support for this
– The role of business in the provision of food.
You are invited to a meeting on Tuesday 28 April from 10 – 12 at Pilton Community Health Project to discuss how we might go about having our voices heard on these issues.
Please let me know if you are able to attend.
Anita Aggarwal (Community Development Manager)
Pilton Community Health Project
73 Boswall Parkway, Edinburgh, EH5 2PW
Telephone 0131 551 1671