Ymgyrchoedd

DDAS attended Castle Square in Haverfordwest with the Recovery Bus from 6pm until 12 midnight for the Saturday evenings in December during the run up to Christmas 2017.

Over the 4 Saturday’s DDAS were present for, we saw 300 people (152 male, 158 female) and we delivered harm reduction advice around drugs and alcohol, gave out Spikeys, condoms and bottles of water.

Steroid use is prevalent across Wales, to tackle this, we have run a number of campaigns to provide information and awareness raising on Performance and Image Enhancing Drugs

One example of this comes from our DDAS service where we linked up with a gym in Carmarthen to offer Dry Blood Spot Testing (DBST) to injecting steroid users. DBST is a quick and safe test to identify the presence of BBVs (Blood Borne Viruses).

DDAS and Cyfle Cymru took our outreach bus for 2 re-freshers events at Trinity College Carmarthen on the 21^st and 24^th January 2018.

Across the 2 events we spoke to 38 people (male -18, female – 20) and gave out 10 Spikeys, 17 condoms and sexual health advice and we also met and built relationships with 2 members of staff from St John’s Ambulance who came on the bus to learn about our service provision.

As Drugaid Cymru, we promoted a campaign to help raise awareness around overdose prevention and Naloxone.

The IP2 (I Promise 2) campaign saw staff and service users pledge to do what they could to help prevent unnecessary deaths from overdose and to promote the use of the life saving drug Naloxone.

Choices West are commissioned to deliver 2 campaigns a year, the plan for this summer campaign were decided in relation to the concerns around the increase reported use of stimulant substances in the three counties.

The plan for this campaign was to target Year 10 pupils, and since May the Choices team have been busy attending secondary schools in Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion.

In response to this we developed a PowerPoint presentation to take into schools through the Dyfed area.  In some schools we delivered during an assembly and in others we delivered a 45minute focus session running the whole day to a particular year group.

At the end of each session we ask for an evaluation form to be completed by the teacher that was present in that session and have included some of the feedback we have received to date:

• “Very informed and well run session, various tasks to allow discussion within group and as a class”
• “Lots of information”
• “Interesting activities”
• “Good use of visual slides – got pupils talking and also engaged pupils to respond well to questions”

In Summer 2017,  Gwent N-gage ran a campaign on festival, camping and rave safety that featured harm reduction information and safety advice for any young person thinking of attending these summer events and considering using substances at them.  The campaign ran with physical resources highlighting danger and safety issues. These were supported by short workshop style interventions for young people and professionals working with young people in the area.