Needle exchange programmes in Visegrad countries: a comparative case study of structural factors in effective service delivery

Table 1 The perceived accessibility and quality of needle exchange programmes in Visegrad countries, the number of needles distributed per client, the geographical coverage of NSPs and the prevalence of HCV among PWID

	Perceived NSP accessibility	Perceived NSP quality	Needles distributed per client per year in 2017^a	The proportion of cities where NPS are present in 2017^b	Prevalence of HCV among PWID^c
CZ	8.9	9.3	199	65%	14.7% (2017)
PL	4.7	7	35	7%	57.9% (2017)
SK	3.5	7.5	184	16%	42.3% (2017)
HU	1.8	5.1	65	21%	49.7% (2015)

Sources [5,6,7] own data
^aThe calculations of the number of needles distributed per client are based on the data in countries’ annual reports (2017) to EMCDDA, with the exception of: the number of needles distributed per client in Slovakia, where EMCDDA data is not available, and the information on the number of clients were obtained by the author directly from the services
^bThe calculations of the proportion of the cities where NSPs are available are based on the information retrieved from NSPs’ websites and annual reports and the total number of cities in each country
^cThe data are based on countries’ annual reports to EMCDDA

ISSN: 1477-7517