 During our trip in Australia, we visited the Access House Programme of the Salvation Army. This short movie features the wide range of services they provide to people who use drugs and sex workers. What are the opening hours of the Needle Exchange Programme? The Needle Exchange Programme is 24-7 every day of the year, so there's always a person on the desk to provide the equipment and also to offer support, provide people with information, refer to other services. This is the area that someone would come into. We have as much information on safer using and services that people can access as much as we can. People can dispose in here, people can collect what they want, and then they can ask the staff member what it is they're after. So we provide sterile water for injecting cotton for as a filter, but we also provide sterile fits, which you can see there, and also wheel filters, which we might be just at the back here, for pills and that sort of thing. So we provide a spoon, which is often complained about because it's not very good, and people lose their gear, but it's the best that we can offer. Syringes and the most common, you know, one mill needle and syringe. We offer a range of different condoms and lube for people. Different gauge needles for different injecting drug use. We have probably an increase in people who are injecting performance and image enhancing drugs through here, so we have, you know, the equipment that can be used for that. Our contacts for the 2012-2013 period was around 40 to 50,000 contacts in the year, which included handing out over a million syringes in that financial year. One of the functions of the exchange program is to serve as a gateway to other services. Does this work here? Yes. How effective is this? You know, the role of the NSP worker is not to just hand out the equipment, but is also to offer information and referral for people based on what the person is seeking. We do not push anything on anyone. If someone is just here to pick up needles, that's all we do for them. But we're always here to offer further information and referral. There's been, I guess, a long history of homelessness in the area since the end of World War II when a lot of the veterans came back to the area, which is where they saw an increase in people living in rooming houses, but also an increase in people who were sex-working. In the 80s, in Melbourne and in Australia, there was an increase in heroin use and injecting drug use, which meant in the early, late 80s, early 90s, that's when we developed the needle and syringe program. This is just sort of a meeting room where we do health promotion, drop-in groups, we run Aboriginal groups, so they do work, like on the wall there. They do basket weaving with, you know, Indigenous elders. They do bead making and things like that, while they see GPs and psychologists. What are the special needs of female clients, female drug users? The biggest thing would be violence. You know, a lot of family violence, street-based violence associated with street sex-working. Our 24-7 needle and syringe program is sort of the only 24-7 service in the area where women can present and get support throughout the night as well, if they've been experienced violence. So like I said, we don't do appointments. Almost all of our services are based on drop-in. We run programs like a naloxone education program, which is run through in partnership with Harm Reduction Victoria, which is our drug user PR service in Victoria. They run naloxone education workshops, and our GP prescribes naloxone. Naloxone also goes under the product name of NARCAN, and it's an opiate antagonist. So in Australia, we get that as a needle, a mini injection needle. We are giving people who inject drugs the medication to be able to reverse that overdose. Through our service here, I think we've trained almost 130 people in naloxone and had reported about 15 reversals just in that sort of eight months. This is a pretty standard clinic space. We have podiatrists, physios and dieticians. We have psychiatrists through a local hospital. We have psychologists through a private clinic. We have social workers. We have Indigenous health workers who all use the same space. All of our services are free of charge. We even offer financial support for people to get the medications or other services that they require. And we can do all pathology here. So we have HIV testing, but we also have an infectious diseases clinic that happens here, which again is run on a partnership. And we have a nurse here that can test weekly as well. Our infectious diseases clinic is all mostly based around hepatitis C management but also linking people into treatment. Just really basic tea and coffee that we can offer people. We offer showers as well, and I can show you down the back here. We have a little veggie garden project that some of the patients are doing. This was funded by the council to do an Indigenous art piece. So some of the men from the rehab did this. There's still a generational mistrust of Western model of health and of white clinic staff and that sort of thing, which is very understandable. So we work really hard to gain trust and engage with the community. The program next door to access health is the Crisis Contact Centre. It's a 24-7 crisis response for people for housing, escaping violence, acute mental health, acute substance use issues. 24-7, there's either a social worker that you can drop into up until 11 o'clock or midnight, or there's a phone number you can call to get emergency housing. So this is all of their space. We offer family areas because often the waiting rooms aren't a nice space for young children to be hanging out in. So we can offer this to families who are homeless and waiting for emergency accommodation through the Crisis Contact Centre. So this is a weekly sort of turnover. Yeah. The Department of Health provide us with syringes and containers and bins and, you know, barrels and needles and that sort of thing, swabs. And then we have money through the Salvation Army to offer us water and filters, dairy filters and wheel filters. There's public bins. So councils fund for bins to be placed in public, you know, in streets, in public toilets and those sorts of things. Or we ask for people to return them to the NSP. So of the, you know, a million, I think it was one million, one hundred thousand needles that went out in 2012, 2013, there was about five hundred thousand returned to us specifically. And then the rest was sort of returned to public disposals or other NSPs, other health centres. Yeah. Is there any like tension with the local people in the neighbourhood because of drug litter on the streets? Look, once upon a time, there would have been before we, you know, promoted public disposal and that sort of thing. But we have a really good relationship in this. You know, there's a really good community here in St Kilda. You know, it's constant work to keep people, you know, involved and to promote the benefits of something like this.