Developing a UK addiction services data roadmap

What is the issue?

Treatment outcomes for people who use alcohol and other drugs are currently less than optimal. This is due to a number of factors, including a lack of high-quality research owing to barriers in accessing high-quality addiction service datasets.

As part of the UK’s Drugs Strategy, From Harm to Hope, the Addiction Healthcare Goals (AHG) programme was launched, with one of its aims being to improve the addiction data research landscape.

How are we helping?

RAND Europe, in partnership with Ipsos UK, WSA Community, and Just Ideas, has been commissioned by the Office for Life Sciences to develop a roadmap to improve the addiction data landscape.

We are doing this by:

• Mapping the stakeholder landscape, including key data owners and data users
• Mapping key addiction service datasets
• Drawing out the key barriers that prevent more widespread use of datasets
• Engaging with dataset experts and people with lived experience of substance use.

The data roadmap will identify key actions to take in the immediate, near and long term to improve the usage of data in addiction service research.

The hope is that the roadmap will set out actions to improve the accessibility and utility of addiction data, leading to research that generates insights that improve treatment and recovery services, and in turn, improve outcomes for people who use alcohol and other drugs.