General BTDIR project information

Project name

Belgian Treatment Demand Indicator Register

Project abbreviation

BTDIR

Project code

HDBP0006

Primary organization that oversees implementation of project

• Sciensano

Partner organization participating in project

• Not available

Organization that commissioned this project

• European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction

Organization providing monetary or material support

• National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance (RIZIV-INAMI)

Brief project description

SCOPE

European drug policies and action plans require sound and comprehensive evidence on what are the main issues in the drug problematic and how to intervene. In order to obtain a better understanding of the different aspects of the drug phenomenon as well as the impact of related measures, the information exchange, data collection and monitoring of the drug situation at the European level are of great importance.

A comprehensive understanding of the extent of the drug use problem requires a review of several indicators:

• the magnitude of drug use measured by prevalence in the general population,
• the potential of problem drug use as measured by drug use among young people,
• drug-related morbidity and mortality and costs and
• consequences of drug use measured by treatment demand.

TREATMENT DEMAND INDICATOR (TDI)

Effective prevention of health problems and other consequences of substance use requires information on the characteristics and patterns of use, as well as data on associated problems. When people with substance use disorders come into contact with health professionals, the data collected is an essential source of information for epidemiology. To this end, the Treatment Demand Indicator (TDI) has been adopted and standardised as an epidemiological indicator in the European Union on behalf of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).

OBJECTIVE

The objective of the Treatment Demand Indicator is to collect information in a harmonised and comparable way across all Member States on the number and profile of people entering drug treatment (clients) during each calendar year. Although the name of the indicator is the ‘Treatment Demand Indicator’, it collects information on people entering treatment. TDI is widely recognised as the instrument for collecting and reporting data on people entering treatment for their drug use inside and outside Europe, as an indirect indicator of the unobserved level of people that are potentially in need of drug treatment.

The primary purpose of the information collected by the TDI indicator is :

• to gain insights into the characteristics, risk behaviours and drug use patterns of people with drug problems entering treatment;
• to help to estimate trends in the extent and patterns of problem drug use, ideally in combination with other drug indicators;
• to calculate prevalence and incidence rates of addiction treatment using indirect methods alongside with other datasets;
• to set up more specific studies by linking this register using the same identifier to other national registries using the same identifier (mortality register, health insurance database).

EUROPEAN AND NATIONAL APPROACH

A common European data collection protocol has been developed and improved over time. Since 2000, the EMCDDA has set up a system of data reporting by the EU Member States and adopted various formal agreements with them in order to stimulate and facilitate the collection and reporting of data from the national to the European level. Currently, the indicator collects data from 30 countries (28 EU Member States, Norway and Turkey) and provides information on almost 500,000 patients per year.

Belgium started standardised data collection for TDI in 2011, when health ministers decided to set up a coordinated registration of treatment requests. Prior to this, several initiatives to gather information at different levels (region, city, groups of centres) on treatment requests for substance use problems had already taken place in Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia. But in order to provide a coherent national view of the phenomenon, it was decided to work on the basis of a national protocol.

Sciensano was appointed as the coordinator of the Belgian TDI register and charged with developing flexible and secure technical tools to facilitate the registration of data in accordance with national privacy rules. Since the 2015 registration year, the Belgian protocol has been updated to include the changes of the third European protocol.

Regulatory framework of this project

Consult the regulatory framework information published on the fair.healthdata.be pages.