Panama City, November 27, 2019. The he International and Ibero-American Foundation for Public Administration and Policy (FIIAPP) is organizing in Panama City the 3rd Bi-regional Meeting for the exchange of best practices among Latin American-Caribbean and European Union countries: Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Drug Demand Reduction, in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Health and the Public Ministry of Panama through the National Commission for the Study and Prevention of Drug-Related Crimes (CONAPRED). The opening of the conference is in charge of the representatives of the Panamanian institutions together with the organizations that have collaborated with COPOLAD in this process from multilateral institutions such as EMCDDA, PAHO/WHO, CICAD/OAS and CARICOM, together with representatives of COPOLAD, of the European Union, as the financing entity and of Spain, as the leader country, through FIIAPP/COPOLAD and the Delegate of the Government for the National Plan on Drugs.
The meeting provides a space to present the progress achieved so far in the field of quality in Drug Demand Reduction (DDR) by Latin American and Caribbean countries, as well as jointly explore the main challenges faced by different institutions that play a key role in the planning and implementation of quality policy in DDR, in order to optimize their efforts in a coordinated manner, and thus move towards legal frameworks to ensure the quality of prevention programs and assistance services on drug addition.
Participan en la reunión responsables de la toma de decisiones en Reducción de la Demanda de Drogas y de la Agencia acreditadora de servicios de salud en cada país, junto a representantes de CELAC y la UE que participan en el Comité Técnico y las Reuniones de Alto Nivel del Mecanismo de Coordinación y Cooperación en materia de Drogas CELAC-UE, responsables de las políticas de drogas en el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de estos países, representantes de las instituciones multilaterales y redes birregionales que participan como agencias colaboradoras en COPOLAD II como el EMCDDA, la CICAD/OEA, la OPS/OMS, las organizaciones de la sociedad civil que colaboran con COPOLAD (RIOD e IDPC); y otros actores relevantes que trabajan en el campo de aseguramiento de la calidad en el ámbito de la RDD, como CARICOM, UNODC y el Plan Colombo para América Latina y el Caribe.
Quality in public health services for drug users.
Ensuring the quality of DDR programs and services is a basic core aspect of drug policies, given their direct impact on improving the quality of life and living conditions, health and life expectancy of the population. In the Spanish Government Delegate for the National Plan on Drugs, Azuzena Martí’s words, “in the face of a public health and safety problem, it is necessary to have quality standards. Anything that is not done to ensure quality from governments, establishing protocols, will be a gap and a risk to society.”
In a context of growing availability of evidence on the effectiveness of interventions in Drug Demand Reduction (DDR), several institutions have developed over the past decades, excellent tools and guidelines to facilitate informed decision-making on quality and evidence in the areas of prevention and treatment of problematic drug use. All these developments aim to facilitate the implementation of strategies, plans, programmes and services in this field, aligned with the principles of respect for human rights, gender equality, the public health approach and the consideration of criteria of effectiveness and efficiency. COPOLAD is working since 2011, together with all the CELAC countries, in order to move towards from this theoretical contribution in the field of quality accreditation on the interested countries of the region.
Luis Alfonzo Bello, on behalf of PAHO/WHO has highlighted that “Panamá es un punto de encuentro, por razones geográficas y políticas, donde se cruzan muchos caminos, y es significativo que estemos aquí. Después de 30 años, la RIOD, UNODC, PAHO, CICAD y otros muchos, hemos desarrollado este producto, bajo el paraguas de COPOLAD, que se ha convertido en una realidad concreta. Damos calidad de vida a las personas que tienen trastornos por uso de sustancias. Este movimiento de la validación e implementación de criterios, tiene que ver con la posibilidad de pasar establecer a cambios efectivos en la manera en cómo se brindan servicios a los usuarios de drogas, en alineamiento con la UNGASS 2016. Este es un tema de derechos humanos, lo que estamos presentando es una herramienta práctica para que la salud sea universal, también para los usuarios de sustancias psicoactivas.”
The role of COPOLAD in the process of adoption and validation of quality criteria in the field of drug demand reduction.
Since the very beginning of its first phase, the Cooperation Programme between Latin America, the Caribbean and the European Union on Drugs Policies (COPOLAD II), based on what PAHO/WHO, CICAD/OAS, UNODC, and EMCDDA contributed up to then, has promoted a process with all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean in which all the National Drug Agencies of the 33 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have participated, and which has involved more than 200 experts, and the collaborating multilateral agencies and bi-regional networks of Civil Society, IDPC and RIOD. This effort currently allows for quality criteria agreed upon in the Region by the countries themselves, and successfully validated in 22 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The role of COPOLAD as the axis of coordination in this process was highlighted by Ramón Espinosa, from EuropeAid, who underlined “the role of the FIIAPP team for the management throughout these years in COPOLAD and for the achievements in all the lines of action of the programme, especially the support of the Mechanism. It is satisfactory for the European Commission because it is these realities that give substance to the political dialogue. COPOLAD appears continuously in all the conversations in different regional areas of CELAC all over the world, it is a source of inspiration in many other political lines of the EU”.
Both the countries and the institutions participating in the COPOLAD process have also carried out, within the framework of the project, a diagnosis of the conditions necessary to promote progress in quality assurance, in order to establish standard frameworks for accreditation in each interested country in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This has been highlighted by Gregor Burkhart, from EMCDDA, who has presented this achievement as a “practical and effective product, which we will always support from the European Drug Observatory. The quality of drug demand reduction services is a challenge for both the EU and CELAC. The EU has only had minimum criteria for 4 years, and the fact that COPOLAD is doing so in Latin America and the Caribbean means that Europe is not lagging behind either. We have the same challenges”.
The work contained in all these processes mentioned above constitutes a valuable basis that facilitates a coordinated institutional effort to promote now more than ever the development of processes for quality assurance and the establishment of regulatory accreditation frameworks in each country of the Americas, in order to ensure the implementation of quality standards in the prevention and care of problematic uses of psychoactive substances in the countries of the Region
In the words of Nadja Porcell, of the Public Ministry of Panama, “Para Panamá es muy importante que estas cooperaciones entre diversos organismos, se cristalicen en esfuerzos reales que nos apoyen en el establecimiento de la normativa, por primera vez, clara, direccionada y dirigida, no solo quienes padecen el consumo sino a sus familias y a sus comunidades”.
Como cierre del ejercicio de validación de estándares de calidad y evidencia, desarrollado durante COPOLAD II, esta reunión presenta el progreso alcanzado por los países de América Latina y el Caribe en el ámbito de la calidad, así como sus planes futuros para avanzar o reforzar los marcos legales de acreditación de calidad de programas y servicios de prevención y tratamiento de los usos problemáticos de drogas. La reunión permite asimismo, el intercambio de mejores prácticas con países de la UE, en relación con el desarrollo de marcos normativos para la acreditación de programas y servicios.
Este proceso se ha visto recientemente reforzado con el acuerdo de colaboración establecido entre COPOLAD y la Oficina de las Naciones Unidas Contra las Drogas y el Delito (ONUDD) para trabajar por la calidad de los programas RDD de tratamiento, considerando la importante similitud existente entre las normas y criterios de calidad desarrollados por la ONUDD y la OMS, con respaldo del Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) del Departamento de Estado de los EE.UU., y los criterios de calidad desarrollados y validados en Latinoamérica y el Caribe en el marco de COPOLAD.
