Naloxone: Bedfordshire Police pilot scheme to help save lives and counter drug overdoses

Bedfordshire Police is piloting a scheme to help save lives and counter opioid overdoses.

Bedfordshire’s deputy chief constable, Trevor Rodenhurst, told the PCC the Delivery and Beating Crime Meeting that the force is piloting a scheme for community teams to carry Naxalone.

Naloxone is a intra-nasal spray emergency antidote commonly used to counter decreased breathing following an opioid overdose.

The aim is to provide extra time for the ambulance service to arrive on scene and take over the emergency medical treatment.

PCC Festus Akinbusoye, asked: “Is this going to be for every officer, or it will just be a select number of officers administering it?

The deputy replied: “At the moment it’s a trial, training is being delivered by local NHS partners to officers in response and custody teams.

“I think at the moment we’re just going to have a specific trial with a controlled sample of people and then we’ll decide based on the trial how far we want to roll that out.

“But it’s pleasing that we are one of the forces that’s taking this on,” he said.

In December, the government launched a ten-year plan to cut crime and save lives by reducing the supply and demand for drugs, and to deliver a “high-quality treatment and recovery system”.

This included expanding the provision of the heroin antidote naloxone to drive down drug-related deaths.

A spokesperson for Bedfordshire Police said: “This [pilot] will commence at the end of June.

“Although it covers Bedfordshire, it will primarily focus on Bedford and Luton.”