Who’s asking me? Service User Perspectives on Safer Injecting Facilities

The purpose of this paper is to explore the thoughts and feelings of safer injecting rooms with people who inject drugs (PWID). This was to gain an insight into their understanding of what this service offers and whether they would be likely to use one should one be available.
The paper only ever intended to make this a small-scale piece of research that focussed on the local need of PWID’s, however this work was made more challenging by the outbreak of Covid-19 and access to PWID became incredibly risky. It is recognised by the author that the sample is very small, but the ideology behind the work was to ensure that PWID were included in any initial discussions proposing any safer injecting facility that may be considered for the local area.
Two PWID’s were interviewed, along with two Harm reduction/needle exchange workers and two other support workers. The PWID were chosen at random during the times the researcher was able to attend the needle exchange. It was the Needle exchange staff who were able to ask people to participate and options were given to decline. The same approach was given to the staff based at the site, offers were made to interview staff and volunteers made themselves available. Many more staff were willing to participate but the idea was to gain insight from those who inject drugs themselves.