Building Future Toxicology Services – Delivering a Long-Term Sustainable model

Given the apparent prevalence of drug driving across the country Police Scotland have articulated their ambition to roll out the roadside testing to all local policing officers in Scotland. Currently this is mostly restricted to Roads Policing officers and rolling this out further will significantly increase the demand for subsequent analysis. Over the past few years an options paper has been developed and discussed by all partners and presented to Scottish Government setting out how this additional demand could be delivered with an indication of associated costs.

A business case is currently being compiled which sets out in more detail four options for a long-term sustainable model for drug driving. To develop this there are several enabling workstreams that are in progress including:

• Progressing the HMICS recommendations in relation to understanding the scale of drug driving in Scotland and also to consider the impact of greater education, awareness and prevention activity.
• A revised long-term forecast of demand considering changes in the model of policing in Scotland and policing priorities.
• Development of the toxicology strategic plan and associated technology roadmap within Forensic Services to maximise the benefit of joint working across criminal and postmortem toxicology services and to ensure the most efficient technology platform and methodology.

A further update on the progress to develop the business case will be provided to the October meeting of the Forensic Services Committee, work on all the above workstreams is under way currently.