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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1636 ..
MR KAINE (continuing):
I believe, therefore, that the matters requiring prior determination as set out in my motion must be addressed before the trial has begun so that we can all be satisfied, particularly those who are opponents of it, that the basis of the trial has at least some semblance of scientific method.
Some might say, "Well, the old grey-haired bloke is opposed to this thing and he is going to fight it to the death." Well, if it was only my opinion, I would accept that comment; but it is not only my opinion. I am not alone in the belief that the trial should be properly conducted. For example, Dr Gabriele Bammer, one of the strongest advocates of this trial, upon whom the minister relies heavily for advice, has expressed similar sentiments to mine in terms of how the trial should be conducted.
In a paper submitted to the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health only in October last year, entitled "Medically supervised injection rooms-How will we know if they work", Dr Bammer made two or three comments that I want to quote. Mostly, they have to do with evaluation. The first has to do with how you do your evaluation. She notes:
For many of the outcomes of interest, the best design will be before-after comparisons, where the situation before the injecting room opened is compared with that after six and 12 months and preferably also longer intervals.
In other words, a before/after comparisons, progressively during the trial preferably, are recognised by Dr Bammer as being essential. She goes further, saying:
Detailed evaluations of all the issues is prohibitively expensive. In addition, for some outcomes of interest, such as fatal overdoses, the numbers that may be influenced by an injecting room are likely to be too small for any meaningful measurement of change.
In other words, she is even pointing out how difficult it is going to be to measure some of the criteria if you adopt them as such. Finally, she says-and this was in October last year:
What we need now is a detailed discussion between policy makers, researchers, and key proponents and opponents to ensure that all the likely measures of success and failure are considered-
all the measures-
Evaluation plans should include a clearly documented rationale for inclusions and omissions.
In other words, there needs to be a very careful study of which evaluation criteria you adopt and which ones you leave out. To read on:
Supervised injecting rooms will continue to be contentious-
this is the point I want to emphasise-
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