Overview
As part of DEN’s educational approach for promoting harm reduction, festival safety is a key area for providing helpful information and resources to minimise unsafe drug use and overdose risk for festival goers.
Present
DEN has launched an overdose safety campaign: “Take a picture, Save a life”. This campaign focuses on encouraging viewers to save an image of overdose information on their phone or other device, so that they have this information at hand and know how to recognise signs of overdose and how to get help. The image is primarily distributed over social media (e.g. Facebook) but is also available for printing and display on festival grounds.
In addition to the campaign, DEN remains in contact with the Youth Action Priorities Network to take part in coordinated responses to major festivals.
Our staff are available to support local festivals and to provide any resources that can inform patrons about preventing and reducing harm from alcohol and other drug use including recognising overdose risk. If you or your organisation is interested in DEN’s festival safety initiatives, please email us at admin@den.org.au.
History
In late 2019, DEN staff liaised with the Youth Action Priorities Network (convened by Hobart City Council) to explore the issue of festival safety and to develop a co-ordinated response for the 2020 Falls Festival.
Falls Festival representatives and St John Ambulance festival staff generously shared their time and thinking on how they were approaching this issue, allowing for shared discussions with a range of stakeholders to provide input and review of drug safety messages to be shared with patrons.
DEN was able to further support the Falls Festival safety response by providing overdose wallet card resources to be shared with patrons by Headspace staff who were on-site at the Festival as well as 50 St John Ambulance volunteers. In addition, DEN was also able to support the festival by sharing overdose information during December via social media, primarily Facebook. This co-ordinated response has also paved the way for resources to be shared at the next upcoming festival, ‘Party in the Paddock’.