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Behind every drug-related death
statistic is a life that could have
been saved. It’s our duty to do more,
says Dr Judith Yates
I first met David in the 1980s when, as a small child, his
mother kept him away from school all too often. She
struggled to cope with life. By the end of the 1990s, in his
early twenties, David was a regular attendee at my surgery,
prescribed methadone and supported by my drug worker.
One night he banged on the back door of the surgery after 7pm when we were
supposed to be closed and trying to pack up and go home. Our gentle-hearted nurse
Angela opened the door to ask what he needed and stepped back as he staggered
in, fell to the floor, stopped breathing and turned rapidly blue. My quick-witted
partner ran to the emergency cupboard and dug out our newly acquired naloxone
kit. Naloxone is the antidote to opiate overdose and David was breathing again,
although still groggy when the ambulance arrived.
When he returned to my surgery for his routine appointment the following
Tuesday he was surprised to be met joyfully by the reception staff who had thought
he might have died. On waking in the hospital he had no idea how he got there,
how close he had been to death, nor the role played by the surgery team. His was
the first life I had known to be saved by naloxone.
It was therefore a shock two weeks ago to see David’s name in the stark ‘drugrelated death’ summary I was reading on a clear sunny day in Birmingham. I had
trodden a familiar path to our local coroner’s office to review the thick ring-bind
folder containing reports of all inquests held in the city during 2016, as part of the
preparation for our newly re-formed drug-related death (DRD) local inquiry group.
It seems that David had no longer been in treatment at the time of his death, as
only heroin had been found on toxicology. I suppose there was nobody around to
administer naloxone on this occasion.
This reviewing of the inquest reports is a miserable job, not only because
beneath the terse language of the certificates lie the shocking stories leading to
these sudden and unexpected deaths, but also because having been a GP in the
area for over 30 years, I have known many of the people who have now come to the
end of their lives in ways which might have been avoidable. It is always especially
upsetting to find that one of my old patients has died in this way.
Last week, standing at the podium to address the audience at the 21st
RCGP/SMMGP Managing drug and alcohol problems in primary care conference, I felt
the warm glow of a room full of people who have been working together for all of
the 21 years and more, but my subject matter – a review of drug-related deaths in
Birmingham – replaced this with an icy chill and a feeling that we must be missing
something. I thought of David and the other people I have known who have died
suddenly and unexpectedly in this way.
We have all read the headlines telling us that heroin-related deaths have more
8 | drinkanddrugsnews | December 2016
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