Some of the following is taken from ABC News report dated Thursday July 9:
The success of the Medically Supervised Injecting Room in North Richmond has been demonstrated with recently released report containing data from Monash University and TurningPoint Centre. The report shows ambulance call-outs for heroin related overdoses fell by about 71 per cent in the area surrounding the North Richmond supervised injecting facility in the first five years the facility opened in 2018.
According to National Ambulance Surveillance System data analysed by Monash University and Turning Point, ambulances were called to about 48 heroin-related incidents every month in Richmond and Abbotsford when the centre opened, at a rate that was increasing every month.
But the number of ambulance call-outs dropped by more than two every month on average once the facility opened, to 14 a month by December 2023.
This amounts to a 70.7 per cent decrease over the first five and a half years, the researchers reported in a paper published by the International Journal of Drug Policy this week.
Heroin-related call-outs also dropped in central Melbourne (43 per cent) and the rest of Victoria (36 per cent) but by a lesser rate, which was even more pronounced per capita.
The analysis looked at 24,000 ambulance calls over nine years across the state.
Twenty-one people still died overdosing on heroin in the City of Yarra in 2024 alone, Coroners Court data released last year showed.
But the City of Melbourne had overtaken the local government area as the neighbourhood with the most heroin-related overdose deaths.
Continued efforts to open an injecting room in the City of Melbourne have stalled due to the Victorian State Government’s inability to identify a suitabe site.
Image courtesy ABC.