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The Responsible Gambling Strategy Board’s advice on the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms 2019–2022

The Responsible Gambling Strategy Board’s advice on the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms 2019–2022

Published
1 February 2019

Last updated
21 December 2022 - Changes

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  1. Contents
  2. Part 4 - Treatment and support
  3. Other aspects of a new treatment strategy

Other aspects of a new treatment strategy

Other issues to be addressed in a new treatment strategy, include the following. Some could be introduced fairly quickly, in advance of subsequent more fundamental change:

  • ensuring that treatment services being offered to people experiencing harms are accountable, assessed against recognised standards and subject to inspection. Discussions between the Gambling Commission and Care Quality Commission (CQC) in England, and separately with Health Improvement Scotland and Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, are in progress
  • prioritising working with experts by experience in the co-design and delivery of services
  • working with other agencies such as Health Education England, Health Education and Improvement Wales and NHS Education Scotland on developing a workforce strategy, to ensure the right skills and experience are available
  • ensuring that family and friends and others adversely affected by other people’s gambling are able to access support, including bereavement support for families and friends of people who have taken their own lives
  • making sure that gambling is one of the issues picked up in the national suicide prevention strategies. One helpful step would be to find effective ways of collecting more information from coroners about cases where gambling is suggested to have been a contributory factor.66
  • encouraging planned work by NICE and other bodies to develop a comprehensive set of national clinical care guidelines
  • making better use of available data on who comes forward for treatment. An annual ‘state of treatment report’ setting out geographical spread, demographic details and services accessed could help give greater prominence to the issues, and identify hotspots and areas of unmet need
  • completing and following through the planned or already commissioned work on harms, the treatment gap and a systematic review of treatment services.67
  • research on those who do not currently come forward for treatment. We need to learn what prompts people to seek treatment, and how needs differ among those who do not currently present for treatment
  • implementing a new longitudinal study to understand more about how people move in and out of harmful play and treatment
  • building a stronger culture of evaluation to inform future commissioning decisions.

References

66 Some research (PDF) (opens in a new tab) is underway to analyse the limited available data and develop methodologies for collecting more evidence to understand this issue better

67 Research projects (opens in a new tab), GambleAware

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