Author: Dr Allison Salmon, Director, The Centre for Impact & Change

The 21st anniversary of the Uniting Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) was marked in October 2022. As a young public health officer, Allison was involved in the 1999 NSW Drug Summit that proposed the establishment of this innovative and controversial public health intervention.

Almost a decade later, she completed her PhD titled ‘Policy and public health: an evaluation of the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre’, where she questioned the level and type of evidence necessary to validate controversial public health policy initiatives. The thesis included an ecological investigation of the success of the MSIC in decreasing overdoses using ambulance attendance data. The first of its kind, this work made a worthwhile and significant contribution to the international evidence base on Supervised Injecting Facilities (SIFs).

Allison has continued to author and co-author a collection of papers demonstrating SIF effectiveness, plus a summary document aimed at supporting future scholars and SIF advocates and a systematic review of SIF evaluation methodologies.

Twenty-one years later, Allison continues to think and write about the MSIC. In a paper led by Professor Carolyn Day, Allison and co-authors addressed the remaining questions that remain regarding the organisational and legal challenges to SIF operation. In their Medical Journal of Australia publication (Twenty‐one years at the Uniting Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, Sydney: addressing the remaining questions (wiley.com)), they drew on the 21 years of MSIC experience, which is broadly reflective of SIFs internationally, and addressed key questions regarding SIF operations and contend that there is sufficient evidence to support SIF rollout and expansion.