Issue - meetings

The Panel considered the report of the Director of Quality and Integration providing the Panel with an update on the development of substance misuse services in Southampton

Katy Bartolomeo (Senior Commissioner - Integrated Commissioning Unit (ICU)), Jackie Hall (Commissioner ICU) Charlotte Matthews (Public Health Consultant) and Stephanie Ramsey (Joint Associate Director of the ICU and Director of Quality and Integration) were in attendance and, with the consent of the Chair, addressed the meeting.

The Panel discussed a number of matters including:

·  The effects of the 2017/18 budgetary adjustments.  Officers explained that a review and redesign of the service had mitigated to a large extent the effects of the budget savings.  The Panel was informed that it seemed that were no detrimentally significant effects of the budgetary amendments;

·  How the Council’s drugs and alcohol strategies had informed the redesign of the service and how the latest review of the service aimed to further align the aims of the strategies and the continued drive for improvement; 

·  How the Council’s performance compared with the performance of the City’s comparator authorities.  The Panel noted that the Council’s service performance was in line with its comparators;

·  The Panel noted that the review of the substance misuse services had combined two services and that the budgetary savings came from back office costings and had little effect on the service users.  It was explained that figures indicated that there had been some decrease in the numbers of cases undertaken but, there was a strong indication that quality of the support offered had continued to reduce the numbers of clients being re-referred to the service;

·  The Panel sought a better understanding of the timetable for the forthcoming review; 

·  The Panel noted that there was a significant level of data that supported the service that was not circulated at the time of the report and thanked officers for their offer to circulate the Dashboard’s for the strategies;

·  It was noted that the report’s use of the phrase “confidence intervals” referred to the measure of certainty of the information.  It was explained that the collection of information had varied levels of accuracy and that the confidence interval referred to a measure of the likelihood of a statistic or measure being accurate;

·  The Panel discussed how the strategies reflected the increasing age range of those dependent on drugs and noted the process undertaken to help those with a dependency.  It was further noted that a clarity from Central Government on good practice could enable more dynamic and effective strategies; and

·  The Panel discussed how partnership working locally and nationally had responded to potential threats to the City from new and dangerous drugs such as Fentanyl.

RESOLVED that the Panel noted the report and stated that it would continue to monitor the performance of the service and would review the forthcoming strategies at an appropriate meeting.