|
|
The term ‘low-threshold’ describes an implementation setting that aims to make it easier for drug users to get access to social and health services. To lower their threshold of access, agencies are placed in specific locations and have opening hours that are adapted to their clients’ needs, including late evening or night-time opening. Low-threshold agencies often also deliver their services through outreach workers. The use of the agencies’ services requires little bureaucracy and often no payment and is not linked to an obligation on the clients’ part to be or to become drug-free. Such agencies target current users who have never been in contact with other drugs and health services and those who have lost this contact. Their services are targeted towards the ‘hard-to-reach’ groups and specific high-risk groups of users and also experimental users (for example, through delivering their services in clubs and discos or other party settings). The low-threshold setting can apply to street agencies, drop-in day centres and field healthcare stations and also to emergency shelters. Within a comprehensive system of care, these agencies, because of their easy accessibility, have an important role in reaching out to the more ‘hidden’ or ‘difficult-to-reach’ populations of drug users. Besides motivating users to seek treatment and making referrals, they often deliver ‘survival-oriented’ services, including food, clothes, shelter, sterile injecting equipment and medical care. They are core settings for disseminating health promotion messages and increasing knowledge and skills regarding safe use among those who use drugs either experimentally or in a dependent or problematic way. Increasingly, they deliver treatment services too.
|
