North Richmond Community Health’s Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR) is among the first in Australia to provide the ground-breaking depot buprenorphine medication, an opioid treatment given weekly or monthly to clients to help reduce and stop heroin use.
The depot buprenorphine was approved for use outside clinical trials in September 2019, and NRCH-MSIR Medical Director, Nico Clark, has since analysed the experiences of the first 41 people to try it. Results highlight that 59 percent of clients did not use heroin at the MSIR in the 28 days after initiating the medicine, despite using the MSIR to inject heroin an average of ten times in the 28 days prior to taking the depot buprenorphine.
Considering that the people using the injecting room have been using heroin on average for more than 25 years, this is an incredible breakthrough, showing promising results of the depot buprenorphine treatment.
“For the majority of people, they either stop or have very, very little heroin use,” – Dr Clark.
Read more from the article published in The Age here.
