Key findings
- Australia's network of 4,218 NSP services was comprised of 106 primary, 800 secondary and 2,913 pharmacy NSPs in 2020/21. These face-to-face services were supplemented by 399 syringe dispensing machines. In 2021, 189 public sector NSPs in all eight jurisdictions provided public sector programs to facilitate access to take-home naloxone.
- Based on ~2,000 NSP occasions of service (OOS) recorded at primary and secondary NSPs that participated on the snapshot day in 2021, two in five (40%) of NSP OOS involved provision of health education/interventions and one in ten (9%) involved a referral.
- Three in four (72%) NSP attendees were male, two thirds (64%) were aged between 30 and 49 years, young people (aged <25 years) comprised 3% of OOS in 2021 and excluding occasions of service where Indigenous status was not reported, 21% of NSP attendees identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander.
- Stimulants and hallucinogens (predominantly methamphetamine) were the most commonly reported drugs injected on the snapshot day in 2021 (44%), followed by analgesics (heroin, other opioids and opioid substitution therapies, 37%) and anabolic agents and selected hormones (predominantly anabolic steroids, 9%).
- Australian NSPs distributed 50.2 million needles and syringes in 2020/21. These were distributed to an estimated population of 74,327 people who inject drugs (excluding people who inject occasionally). This equates to 675 needles/syringes each per annum, exceeding the UNAIDS definition of high syringe coverage by more than three-fold. Syringe coverage (syringes per injection) remained high at 121% in 2020/21.
