Evaluation of Simon Community Scotland’s Safer Services Harm Reduction approach
The Policy institute is pleased to have been awarded funding by the UKRI to evaluate Simon Community Scotland’s Safer Services programme: a harm-reduction approach to supporting people accessing homelessness services who use drugs.
Harm reduction refers to policies and programmes that tend to focus on the prevention of drug-related harm rather than the prevention of drug use. These approaches have been trialled in a range of settings internationally. There is a growing body of evidence on the effectiveness of harm reduction approaches to reduce the negative outcomes associated with drug use. However, while the use of harm reduction in general has a strong evidence base, the use of harm reduction approaches in homelessness services has been studied less. This is a significant evidence gap, particularly in Scotland, where substance use related harms and deaths reflect disparities in health and social outcomes.
Simon Community Scotland are a homelessness organisation in Scotland who have recently started using the Safer Services approach. Their overall objective is to reduce drug related harms and deaths and to ‘promote safety and wellness over any requirement to stop or not use drugs’ in their services. They report seeing early indicators of the benefits of this approach.
The Policy Institute is partnering with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience to conduct a feasibility evaluation of the Safer Services approach. This will assess the implementation of their approach and it’s ‘readiness for trial’ to understand whether further evaluations could be conducted going forward.