Data from the Scottish Drug Misuse Database

The commentary below provides a Scotland-level perspective on problem drug use based on information reported to the Scottish Drug Misuse Database. More detailed statistics, including analyses by health board and council area in which services are located, are presented in Tables 1 to 28 at the end of this section. Tables 29 to 47 present analyses by health board and council area in which the patient/client is resident at time of attendance. The latter set of tables are new to this publication.

Most of the information shown relates to new attendances at services during the year 1998/99. On a number of topics, trend data over the period 1992/93 to 1998/99 are also presented (see Tables 2, 3, 5, 19, 22, 24 and 28).

Summary

The information in this section relates to new patients/clients seen at reporting services between 1 April 1998 and 31 March 1999.

In total, information was received on 10992 new attendances at services during 1998/99. Details of these contacts are shown in Table 1. Some contacts are by individuals who attended more than one service during the period and the matching criteria, described in Annex 5, are employed to determine the first contact at any service within the period for each individual. It is estimated that 9500 new individual patients/clients were reported in the period. Tables 4 to 47 are based on information obtained at the first contact in the year at any service from each individual drug misuser.

Information on penal establishment inmates, i.e. data from prisons and data from agencies reporting individuals seen in prison, have been excluded from the tables and charts below in part to ensure the comparability of information between health boards/local council area and in part due to incomplete data. Information about these contacts is available on request.