Report on the Drug Situation 2010 - Bundesministerium für ...

By December 2009 Lower Austria had finished building a province-wide network ofdrugs advice and treatment centres. In Carinthia two new centres providing multiprofessionalservices were opened at Spittal/Drau and Völkermarkt, in order toimprove decentralised service provision especially regarding opioid substitution treatment(Prehslauer, personal communication). It will not be possible in the foreseeablefuture, however, to execute plans to rebuild the withdrawal department of AntonProksch Institute (API) as funding has not been secured (Hörhan, personalcommunication).Addressing new target groups continues to be an objective of a number of measuresthat have been planned. For instance, in the reporting period the Dialog associationplanned and implemented its Brainstorm group services for schizophrenic men (seeChapter 7.3) as well as a social work project in offices of general practitionersdelivering substitution treatment (Dialog 2010b): social workers are present in doctors'offices to establish contacts to OST patients who do not receive any further psychosocialsupport. This seems to be the case for 75% of the patients undergoingsubstitution treatment whom the social workers addressed. Another new plan is the'open timeline' service at the integrative addiction support centre at Wassermanngassein Vienna. It targets clients who require low-threshold approaches (without schedulingof appointments) in order to receive regular support and treatment services. The opentimeline service will be run parallel to the scheduled sessions.Carinthia is about to establish an outpatient department for chronic cannabis userswho also suffer from psychiatric diseases (Prehslauer, personal communication).Another new pilot project has been started by Grüner Kreis and the prison of Stein, inwhich prisoners undergoing substitution treatment may receive psychotherapy parallelto OST (see Chapter 9.5).However, there are still groups of addicted patients who do not get the support theywould need. According to Eisenbach-Stangl et al. (2009), this includes people withoutsocial insurance (especially regarding inpatient treatment) and people of foreignnationality. Spirig et al. (2010) also point to the group of older drug users (seeGÖG/ÖBIG 2009b) for whom no adequate services exist, neither in the drug treatmentsystem nor regarding social services. A possible reason for this deficit is that thistarget group is underestimated, that the competences and remits of service providersare not clearly defined and that they are reluctant to accept responsibility. The expertsconsulted recommend that the existing structures be used so that older drug users arenot treated differently from others, which is in line with their own demands. Thismeans that nursing and old-age care services should be opened to this group, andexisting structures and approaches be modified accordingly. This would have to becombined with specific training for staff as well as public relations activities in order toreduce prejudice against addicted people, which in turn requires willingness and actionon the part of policy makers, however, as funds are needed to establish the requiredChapter 5 / Drug-related Treatment: Treatment Demand and Treatment Availability 39