Tag: ten year plan

Expansion of life-saving opioid overdose treatment

New 10-year plan to expand and improve the drug and alcohol workforce published

  • Police officers, probation workers, paramedics, nurses and other professionals will be able to provide take-home supplies of opioid overdose treatment to save lives.
  • New 10-year plan to expand and improve the drug and alcohol workforce published.
  • Part of government mission to reduce drug deaths and support people with recovery

More professionals such as nurses, paramedics, police officers and probation workers will be able to supply a life-saving opioid overdose antidote without a prescription to save the lives of the most vulnerable, the UK government has announced. 

The government will shortly update legislation to enable more services and individuals to provide take-home supplies of naloxone, which almost immediately reverses the effects of an opioid overdose by reversing breathing difficulties. 

This means the medicine can be given to a family member or friend of a person who is known to be using opiates – such as heroin or opioids including potent synthetic opioids like fentanyl or nitazenes – or to an outreach worker for a homelessness service working with people who use these drugs, to save lives in the event of an overdose. 

Alongside this, the government is today publishing a new 10-year strategic plan to expand and improve the drug and alcohol treatment and recovery workforce.  

This is the first national workforce plan for this specialist part of the health workforce in England and outlines key milestones to grow, train and develop staff. This will include bringing more new and experienced professionals into the sector and developing better training for roles that are currently unregulated such as drug and alcohol workers.   

Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins said:  “Opioid addiction can ruin lives and is responsible for the largest proportion of drug-related deaths across the UK.  

“We are working hard to reduce those numbers by expanding access to naloxone to save the lives of the most vulnerable. 

“Our 10-year workforce plan will expand and boost the training of the next generation of drug and alcohol workers to improve services and support people to get their lives back on track.”

The workforce plan builds on the government’s 10-year drugs strategy to combat illicit drug use and reduce drug deaths. Expanding access to naloxone will contribute to the government’s ambition to prevent nearly 1,000 drug-related deaths in England by the end of 2025, reversing the upward trend for the first time in a decade. 

As part of the strategy, an additional £532 million is being invested between 2022 and 2025 to improve the capacity and quality of drug and alcohol treatment.

This additional funding is supporting the expansion of the workforce by the end of 2024/25 with:  

  • 800 more medical, mental health and other regulated professionals
  • 950 additional drug and alcohol and criminal justice workers
  • more drug and alcohol commissioners in every local authority to commission services more effectively

More than 3,900 additional staff have already been recruited using drug strategy funding.  

The new workforce plan, developed by the Office for Health and Improvement (OHID) and NHS England (NHSE), builds on this progress and maps out the next 10 years of workforce transformation with key 1-year, 3-year and 10-year milestones.   

This includes: 

  • New training curriculums for three currently unregulated roles by March 2025. These roles are drug and alcohol workers, children and young people’s drug and alcohol workers and peer support workers. Accredited training will be available for these roles by March 2027 and the first cohorts of trainees will complete their training by March 2029.
  • More addiction psychiatry training posts to expand the bank of posts currently available by March 2025.
  • More regulated professionals working in the sector will mean services have high-quality clinical governance and clinical supervision in place by March 2027.

Naloxone can currently be administered by anyone in an emergency but can only legally be supplied without prescription by a drug and alcohol treatment service to a person to take home for future use.    

The government will update legislation via a statutory instrument to expand the number of services and professions which can supply the medicine over the next few weeks. 

It follows a public consultation in which the responses were overwhelmingly supportive of proposals. 

Opioid-related deaths make up the largest proportion of drug-related deaths across the UK, with an average of 40 deaths a week, and widening access to naloxone for those at risk of overdose will make a substantial difference.  

In 2022, opioids were involved in:  

  • 73% of drug misuse deaths registered in England
  • 60% of drug misuse deaths registered in Wales
  • 82% of drug misuse deaths registered in Scotland
  • 60% of drug misuse deaths registered in Northern Ireland

National Trust for Scotland announces ambitious ten-year strategy

The conservation charity launches ambitious 10-year strategy, aims include:

  • Commitment to become carbon negative by 2031, as Scotland’s largest independent conservation charity
  • Expanding the number of people welcomed to Trust sites across Scotland to more than 6 million people per year by 2032
  • Investment of £38 million in the care of the Trust’s places within the next three years, and £100 million across the lifetime of the strategy
  • Commitment to increasing the Trust’s learning work, through developing skills and new learning and research programmes

Today conservation charity, the National Trust for Scotland, has unveiled a new strategy – Nature, Beauty & Heritage for Everyone, as it refocuses its vision of caring for, sharing, and speaking up for Scotland’s magnificent heritage.

The bold strategy will be delivered over the next ten years as the Trust works towards its centenary in 2031, by which point it intends to be carbon negative.

Chief Executive Philip Long OBE says the strategy is a ‘firm renewing’ of the charity’s commitment to its founding principles of caring for Scotland’s special places and working to make these places as accessible as possible and inspirational for all.

The charity also revealed for the first-time figures which show the scale of its social and economic impact on Scotland. Economically, the direct and indirect impacts of the National Trust for Scotland in 2019-20 are estimated at 7,430 jobs, which can also be expressed as £148 million Gross Value Added.

However, the study went further, using feedback from member and visitor surveys to identify the proportion of visitors who gain strong positive wellbeing benefits that they are unable to obtain elsewhere. When these proportions were applied, it equates to an additional £73 million of annual social value. 

And these figures are set to grow further, as the charity is currently recruiting for around 300 seasonal and permanent roles to deliver its new ten-year vision, which has been created to ensure the Trust’s places are cared for and bring benefit to Scotland’s people and communities for years to come.

Recognising the integral role that members play in the future of the charity, from championing Scotland’s heritage through to speaking up for the invaluable work the Trust does, the new strategy also outlines the Trust’s commitment to grow its diverse membership base to over half a million people across Scotland over the next ten years.

At the heart of the strategy is a programme of projects and investment, with a spend of £38 million planned for 2021 – 2024, and with the intention to invest £100 million across the lifetime of the strategy, supported by the Trust’s fundraising work.

Hundreds of individual projects are planned and on top of that there will be many new initiatives to create opportunities to get more people involved in, and learn from, Scotland’s heritage.

Projects include:

  • On the Isle of Canna, the Trust is continuing to work in partnership with the community, restoring Canna House to better care for its collections as well as developing new visitor and community facilities.
  • On Staffa, one of Scotland’s most important islands for seabirds, geology and cultural heritage, the Trust is improving the island infrastructure and further conserving and protecting this special place of natural beauty that has influenced artists, musicians and writers from around the world since its ‘discovery’ in the 18th century.
  • The Corrieshalloch Visitor Gateway in Ross-shire will be a new addition to the National Nature Reserve with one of the deepest and most spectacular gorges of its type in the British Isles. It currently has no visitor facilities, so the Trust is improving access with a much needed, sensitively designed visitor gateway building, to help visitors enjoy and find out more about Corrieshalloch’s wonderful nature. This project is supported by the Natural and Cultural Heritage Fund which is led by NatureScot and funded through the European Regional Development Fund.
  • In Dumfries and Galloway, the Threave Landscape Restoration Project is transforming 81 hectares of land at Kelton Mains into rich habitats for flora and fauna, restoring the site’s wetlands and native woodlands.

The new strategy is the most collaborative in the National Trust for Scotland’s 90-year history and has been shaped by its employees, volunteers, members, supporters, partners and communities, through consultation which has aimed to find out what the Trust’s places need and what people want from the National Trust for Scotland in the coming years.

This feedback informed three ‘pillars’ of activity:  conservation, engagement and sustainability, which combine to deliver the Trust’s charitable purpose.

These pillars are served by eleven strategic objectives which will support the Trust in its work to protect and share Scotland’s special places and minimise the charity’s environmental impact. 

Philip Long OBE, Chief Executive of the National Trust for Scotland, said: “We’ve begun an exciting new chapter for the National Trust for Scotland, building on the experience, knowledge and skills we’ve gathered over the last 90 years, throughout which time our charity has received phenomenal support from its members and many others.

“Everyone can benefit from Scotland’s heritage and from the work of the Trust, and in the years ahead we want to involve as many people as possible in this. Our new strategy is a response to all that our charity has achieved over its long history, and to the current health, economic and environmental challenges which affect everyone.

“In creating our new strategy we’ve set out a framework that charts our ambitions for the Trust’s tenth decade, describing our intended achievements: from becoming carbon negative by 2031, through to championing Scotland’s heritage for everyone, restoring and protecting habitats, historic buildings and landscapes and uncovering and sharing more of our nation’s stories to a larger and more diverse audience of 6 million annual visitors.

“We’re also recruiting colleagues to bring even more experience to our dedicated and passionate team throughout the country, to allow us to realise these ambitions.”.

For more information on Nature, Beauty & Heritage for Everyone, and to learn more about the strategy and its objectives, visit: www.nts.org.uk/our-work/our-strategy.

Nature-Beauty-Heritage-for-Everyone.-A-National-Trust-for-Scotland-ten-year-strategy.Download