Concerned about your own or
someone else’s drug use?

Illegal drug markets lack quality control features of regulated markets. New psychoactive substances frequently emerge and established drugs can vary in strength, form, contamination or adulteration, posing risk of elevated drug-related morbidity and mortality.

Prompt clinical alerts about unpredictable drug markets may help to inform health professionals best-positioned to prevent and respond to drug-related adverse events. Access to timely, accurate and appropriate information can, however, be limited as clinicians are faced with the challenge of staying up-to-date with changing markets and managing competing work demands.

To understand factors influencing successful implementation and evaluation of drug alert systems, a rigorous mixed-methods co-design framework will be used to develop and test an acceptable clinical alert prototype for professionals responding to the needs of people at-risk of drug-related morbidity and mortality in Victoria.

A survey of the sector will be utilised to establish the need for and the challenges associated with clinical alerts. The survey will inform 6 in-depth, iterative, digital co-design workshops with clinicians working across alcohol and other drugs (AOD) and urgent care settings. The challenges of generating these alerts will be explored, and finally, prototype alerts will be produced and tested.

Our team brings together relevant Victorian agencies, including the Victorian Department of Health, Safer Care Victoria, Turning Point, 360Edge, Uniting ReGen and Harm Reduction Victoria, with the research led by RMIT University with support from Monash University and Flinders University.

The national Prompt Response Network, the developing Victorian Early Warning System, and the EWSs in other jurisdictions of Australia may benefit from the outcomes of this project, which will produce drug alert templates that optimise the translation of available data sources on new drug trends for use in clinical practice.