Supervised consumption services have shown effectiveness at reducing drug-related overdoses, but access to care remains limited for some individuals. In the past 3 years, new types of digital public health programs have been created that aim to reduce drug related deaths. Recent studies have shown various types of digital and remote services have been launched but there is no consensus in the literature around neither naming conventions and definitions nor core outcome sets and data standardized data collection to enable the comparison between diverse services. In contrast to other core outcome set studies in this area, ours focuses on harm reduction interventions which pose additional challenges in the collection of data, balancing the opportunity for public health data collection with the mission of these services to be accessible to all. Thus our objectives are to create a set of naming conventions for these services which will help to define the field alongside the creation of minimum core outcome sets for virtual harm reduction services of this nature.
ContributorsWilliam Rioux (University of Alberta)
Dylan Viste (University of Calgary)
Dr. Tyler Marshall (University of Alberta)
Alexandra Loverock (University of Alberta)
Fahad Safi (University of Alberta)
Paul Chiosil
Nicolas Crier (UBC Transformative Health and Justice Research Cluster, BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services, Vancouver Coastal Health and Megaphone Magazine)
Dr. Joanne Cogdell (Naxos Neighbors)
Oona Kreig (BRAVE)
Monty Ghosh (Univeristy of Alberta, University of Calgary)
Disease Category: Tobacco, drugs, & alcohol dependence
Disease Name: Substance Use and Addiction
Age Range: 18 - 90
Sex: Either
Nature of Intervention:
- Consumers (patients)
- Epidemiologists
- Patient/ support group representatives
- Researchers
- Service providers
- Service users
- Academic research representatives
- COS for clinical trials or clinical research
- COS for practice
- Delphi process
Consensus on naming conventions and core outcome sets will be achieved through the Delphi technique using 3 rounds which aims to reach 70% agreement for consensus on the aforementioned topics. Information will be collected from 3 main groups including academic experts, harm reduction service providers and people with lived and living experience of substance use. A steering committee consisting of a representative sample of 6 members of these groups will be consulted and will approve the development of the initial Delphi questionnaire. This study aims to gain a minimum of 12 participant perspectives with a maximum of 40 participants who are proportionally representative of the 3 participant categories. Surveys will be distributed through an online survey software (Qualtrics) and open ended responses will be analysed through NVivo qualitative data analysis software.