As a past chair of the Royal College of Nursing Mental Health Forum, which includes substance misuse, one of the elements I pushed for and achieved was low cost training of staff at their interface, be they nurses with their patients, or police officers and members of the public.

Noting Anna Zammit McKeon’s letter of 25 September and her penultimate paragraph, maybe the answer lies in the provision of some low cost training similar to that I have run for the past 10 years in the UK for police officers, on the difference between needles and syringes used by diabetes (orange in the UK) and those used by people injecting illicit drugs (green or blue in the UK).

No police officer can be expected to know the difference, as I would assume it is not part of Maltese police basic training.

David Harding

Mellieha