Welcome to the Concordat
In less than a year, the Concordat of providers of full recovery has grown beyond expectation in numbers – and is strengthened by “The Graduates”: about 30,000 people in recovery who successfully graduated drug-free from their rehabs. It has also launched a Watchdog function, to ensure best-practice commissioning of drug and alcohol treatment services.
The core aim is true patient choice: that the majority of addicts whom research confirms want to be free from addiction are allowed that choice. To be free from active addiction, they should have access to the treatment they need at the time they need it.
The Concordat will work with all providers of treatment, so that they can refer to rehab and rehab can refer patients to them where appropriate, in a seamless continuum of care, in order to support full, sustainable recovery. Our ambition is to increase access to rehab from its current 2% of patients in the treatment system to at least 10% over the next few years – guided by the need of the patient rather than the power of the commissioner.
This aim coalesces with goal of the Coalition’s drug strategy and the prime minister (see below) but is not being implemented locally.
The Coalition government’s first drug strategy: Reducing demand, restricting supply, building recovery: supporting people to live a drug-free life has two overarching aims: to reduce illicit and other harmful drug use, and to increase the numbers recovering from their dependence on drugs.
“Drugs policy has been a failure over recent years… We have spent too much time on heroin replacement and methadone rather than on trying to get people clean and clear up all the things in their lives that perhaps cause them to take drugs in the first place,”
David Cameron, 29 June 2011 (Hansard 954).
To help achieve the government’s strategy aims, a rehab revolution arose in January with a blog and declaration signed by a unique union of half of England’s rehabs, organisations which have thousands of years’ experience between them in getting addicts drug free, as research proves most addicts want.
Click here for history of how and why the Concordat arose.
Click here for news to June 2011.
Concordat Graduates and Watchdog launches in House of Commons, autumn 2011
