The head of an addiction support organisation has said the people they work with are still struggling to access NHS services, claiming that the “covid card” is being used as an excuse for “complete inaccessibility”.

Justina Murray, CEO of Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol and Drugs, said covid recovery “isn’t really much of a reality” for the families they support.

“We’re still finding it incredibly difficult to contact statutory drug and alcohol treatment services.

“[These are] issues that have really been prevalent since last March – you think ‘okay maybe it’s just for a couple of weeks it will be an issue getting somebody to pick up the phone or return a voicemail.'

“It’s amazing the number of statutory services that don’t even have an ‘info @’ or ‘contact us’ email address, or anything like that.

“It’s just complete inaccessibility, and that cannot be excused, definitely not with the covid card being played now.”

Scotland recorded more than 700 suspected drug deaths in the first half of 2021, according to information collated by Police Scotland.

Drugs minister Angela Constance described the figures, which showed a small decrease on the previous year, as "cautiously encouraging".

Ms Murray was speaking at Voluntary Health Scotland’s annual conference.

During a panel discussion , third sector health leaders warned their organisations and the people they support were at risk of being overlooked.

Support in Mind Scotland CEO Frances Simpson said: “I feel there is a sense [that] when the voluntary and community sector was really needed, there was lots of money and extra support and all the rest of it.

“But now there is a sense in which the policy makers are almost picking the bits they want to pick but leaving other things behind.

“So, the technology is great and there’s quite a lot of focus on it, but as you say, for a lot of people we support with serious mental illness, mental health problems, they lost out to numerous NHS appointments, face to face assessments and all sorts of things, and you can’t make that up just by a video”.

Julie Wardrop of CanDu, which supports cancer patients, said: “[This] group, I think we all know, has really struggled through all of this, as everybody has, but there’s a real sense from some of the people that I know and we work with of being distanced more and more from services.

“And even as things are getting back to normal, that face to face, person-centred kindness, hasn’t been put in place – the distancing has been kept there.”

Read more: ’No target’ for face to face GP appointments; GP MSP: Patient pathways increasingly "broken"; Near Me rolling out into third sector

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