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Dear Colleague,

NATIONAL QUALITY STANDARDS FOR SUBSTANCE MISUSE SERVICES

The Action Plan in October 2004 which followed the Executive's Review of Drug Treatment and Rehabilitation Services recommended development of national standards with an emphasis on outcomes for service users, together with systems for monitoring and evaluation. To begin this process representatives of drug and alcohol services, service commissioners and regulatory bodies such as the Care Commission and the Social Work Inspection Agency met with the Executive and produced a set of Draft Quality Standards and underpinning statements.

In February 2006 a consultation on these draft standards was held and the three main points arising from it were -

• The standards were generally welcomed though some changes were suggested and further clarification requested.
• Standards should be revised to place more importance on the needs of children and young people and to indicate more precisely the responsibilities of service users.
• Monitoring tools and a national framework should be developed which will recognise different types of service and link to existing inspection structures but will not impose any additional burden on services.

Scottish Ministers are now pleased to publish the National Quality Standards for Substance Misuse Services which have been revised in line with these recommendations.

The standards are expected to improve the consistency and quality of substance misuse service provision in Scotland. They will form the foundation of a framework that is intended to enable service providers to examine and continuously improve their service delivery, increase accountability, and assist service commissioners to make evidence based funding decisions. They will provide a benchmark for the level of quality that should be consistently reached for all services working with substance misusers.

These standards will form part of the background for the forthcoming stocktaking exercise to assess the current performance of ADATs and examine their capability to deliver Ministerial priorities on drugs and alcohol against the principles of best value. It is expected that ADATs and commissioners will incorporate them into their monitoring arrangements and the Scottish Executive is considering whether in future there should be a link between adherence to the standards and the allocation of funding. This would ensure that decisions about service provision are based on evidence of good practice.

Currently service providers should examine and adjust existing methods they use for evaluating current effectiveness of service delivery to incorporate the standards, and use these to assess and improve the quality of their provision. The evidence produced by this process can then be used to inform any external monitoring of the service, demonstrate quality of service provision and underpin any funding bids.

The next stage in the process, building on pilot projects conducted during the consultation on the draft standards, is to develop an evaluation framework over the next year which allows services to monitor improvements in their delivery of support. To facilitate this the Scottish Executive has appointed a secondee to work with the national steering group. This work programme will include:

• awareness raising work with service users, service providers, commissioners and ADATs.
• engagement and consultation with service providers to support implementation.
• developing common practice and tools for monitoring.
• publication of further guidance on monitoring and evaluation for services.

In order to facilitate the implementation of the National Quality Standards it is important that you now familiarise yourself with these standards and start to make use of them in all of your activities.

We will be working with you to develop an evaluation framework and your participation in this process is welcomed.

Yours sincerely

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