Mr. Jorge Fernández López is a psychologist and director of the Low Demand Intervention Centre of the Citizens' Anti-AIDS Committee of the Valencian Community. C.I.B.E. MARÍTIM.
The CIBE MARITIM centre has been collaborating with our Master's degree for years and is one of the institutions where our students carry out external internships with satisfaction and good results for their training. The centre represents another perspective in the treatment and care of drug addicts that they describe on their website.
D. Jorge Fernández on this occasion highlighted the importance of the key concept that they work with and that in the form of a question indicates the title of this conference. We have moved from intervention in drug addiction with a "drug-free" approach to intervention in "active users", a new philosophy in which the drug addict who continues to use and does not plan to give it up is cared for. This form of care includes subjects with great deterioration, absent from social support, isolated from their families, homeless, without support, disconnected from everything and everyone. Faced with this situation, the CIBE MARITIM centre asks them, what do you need from us? In this way they are faced with "reducing the damage" caused by drug use and the social disconnection of many of their patients. The low-demand centres offer comprehensive care for basic needs, the strategy is not to maintain abstinence but to minimise the harm to these individuals who suffer extreme marginalisation.
They cover the need for food, hygiene, rest, and with this they try to work on responsibility, guide the users to the use of the care resources, to the improvement of their health, evaluating the situation of HIV, hepatitis and other illnesses. The objectives are short term and if specific training is necessary to work on addictions, the professionals in the low-demand centres also need a high degree of training to achieve adherence and to get them to come to the centre, active listening to detect their needs, to make them feel well, in short, to recover the individual. The work involves the collaboration of different professionals: psychologists, doctors, nurses, social workers and social educators and different social and judicial bodies.
He explained the difficulty they are experiencing at this time of pandemic. With the lockdown, the centre had to close its doors, but opened the window, through which they offered medicine, food and support. There is no telematic attention for this group, they adapted by limiting the time of each person and the number of people, extending the opening time of the centre in accordance with the regulations. Despite the difficulties, the doors are still open and the windows are still open to say to the drug addict: "How can we help you?
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