1 TURNING EVIDENCE INTO PRACTICE

Preventing drug-related deaths Drug misuse is a major contributor to premature mortality.1 People who use drugs are up to ten times more likely to die suddenly or as a result of chronic diseases than people who do not use drugs.2 Many of these deaths are preventable. This document provides a checklist for services and local areas that want to improve their practices in this area. The content is drawn from published evidence, authoritative guidance, and feedback from drug treatment services. What is the issue? Recorded rates of drug-related deaths3 are higher in England than in most other European countries. This high number of drug-related deaths partly reflects the fact that the population of injecting drug users in England since the ‘epidemic ’ of the 1980s is growing older. People with long histories of drug dependency are more likely to be in poor health and to engage in dangerous injecting behaviour, and are at greater risk of dying from overdose. Deaths often involve a combination of drugs as well as opioids, with alcohol and stimulants frequently mentioned on death certificates. Deaths involving new psychoactive substances (sometime