As part of the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System, comprehensive data about the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction is collected from over 2000 treatment providers. This data is analysed to determine how long individuals remain in treatment, the reasons for their discharge from treatment, and the journey they take through the treatment service.
These analyses are used to form a set of monthly reports which provide an indication to the performance of treatment providers and the Drug Action Teams (also known as Drug and Alcohol Action Teams, Strategic Partnerships, etc) in dealing with addiction problems. Although the reports are mainly used by workers in the addiction treatment field, they have also been granted the status of National Statistics and are published each month on this website, where they are freely available for public view.
To assist with the analysis of such a large amount of data, the monthly reports are broken down into several categories.
These reports form the main performance management reporting and examine the "effectiveness" of drug treatment. The reporting suite consists of 3 reports, each broken down to examine either Problematic Drug Users regardless of age, or Adults (i.e. those aged 18 or over) regardless of drugs used.
These reports are targetted specifically at treatment of under 18s, and use a slightly different methodology to the main PDU / Adult reports as the types of intervention / treatment typically used with Young People have a different focus.
These reports are targetted at treatment of those whose identify Alcohol as their primary problem substance. Alcohol reports were introduced for the first time in April 2008, and are currently produced using a similar methodology to Young People reports (the current journey-based methodology employed by PDU / Adult reporting was also introduced in April 2008 and it was felt unwise to introduce new reports based on a new methodology).
These reports reflect some of the figures from the main PDU reports, but grouped by the 67 NHS Mental Health Trusts, rather than by DAT.
A short guidance document has been written for each type of report, and these are available on the report pages themselves. The reports can be access via the links at the top of this page.