Building a European consensus on minimum quality standards for drug treatment, rehabilitation and harm reduction

Abstract

Background/aims: The Study on the Development of an EU Framework for Minimum Quality Standards and Benchmarks in Drug Demand Reduction (EQUS) has set up an inventory of quality standards and initiated a consensus-building process, aiming at establishing a set of European minimum quality standards (MQS) for treatment/rehabilitation and harm reduction in the field of drug abuse and dependence.

Methods: Existing documents were collected by country-specific experts and integrated into a predefined framework of quality standards. Agreement, implementation status and expected implementation problems of the proposed standards were assessed by a survey of European stakeholders and the final lists of European MQS were established at a European conference.

Results: Overall, 349 documents were identified as relevant. Major gaps were identified for ethical and legal standards, and for documents that provide grades of evidence for specific standards. A high level of acceptance was found for the treatment/rehabilitation MQS, while a somewhat lower level was found for the harm reduction MQS. The final lists of MQS were based on at least 80% of acceptance by European experts and stakeholders.

Conclusion: A high consensus of European MQS for treatment/rehabilitation and harm reduction has been achieved. Further implementation and developmental steps are discussed.