Spiked in Bristol: Could a new testing centre give victims clarity and closure?
A Bristol doctor has called for a new facility in the city where people who think they've been spiked can get tested.
Dr Tom Roberts, a lecturer at the University of Bristol and doctor at Southmead Hospital, said it would give them more clarity over what had happened.
Medics do not routinely test alleged victims of spiking for drugs or their blood-alcohol level when they attend an emergency department.
Dr Roberts spoke to ITV News West Country following the case of Simone White, who experienced serious neurological problems after her drink was reportedly spiked.
He said: "I think there’s definitely an expectation to reality mismatch.
"People come expecting clarity and diagnostic testing, and for us to tell them exactly what’s going on, but it’s just not something that we’re able to do or provide."
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this report, there is help available to you. Visit the Stamp Out Spiking charity for support, resources and guidance. If you believe you have been a victim of crime, contact your local police force to report it.
It follows a practice review by Dr Roberts and six others in 2023, addressing the rising reports of drink and injection spiking over the previous two years.
He worked with psychologist Dr Jo Daniels to assess how a lack of testing could leave victims feeling confused and inhibit their recovery.
"A lot of it comes from the inability to form memories around the event.
"So most people are intoxicated with alcohol or another substance and they maybe don’t remember what’s happened.
"A lot of the potential trauma down the line comes from that - this inability to form memories, the inability to form a clear timeline of what happened - and when your mind fills in the blanks, it generally does that quite negatively.
"You can get a lot of thoughts like ‘was I actually at risk from sort of physical or sexual assault?’ and these things ruminate in your mind.
"For a small subset of people, those thoughts become quite severe. It becomes a traumatic event and they have a really significant psychological impact," Dr Roberts said.
He added that patients were routinely advised to contact the police themselves to make a report, but that doctors could not do this for them.
"Police do attend the emergency department, for things like sexual assault and physical assault, and there are quite clear pathways for the investigation of those things.
"In some ways, if there’s been a clear secondary crime committed, you’re more likely to have available testing," he said.
Dr Roberts added that many clinicians have also argued that testing a patients will not change how they are treated, so it isn't useful for emergency medics.
"We see two groups of patients. There are those who come to the emergency department overnight, acutely unwell, confused and distressed because of what’s going on.
"And then there’s another group of patients who come the next morning having woken up, disorientated, in their own bed. They come to the ED clinically well but looking for answers.
"Then people are going back and forth to the police, and back to us trying to seek testing - but nowhere routinely does it," Dr Roberts explained.
In some cases, doctors might do blood tests to decide how to treat a patient, but even if these tests are done, the results can't be used as forensic evidence, he explained.
That is not the only challenge. In the UK, the majority of victims are spiked with extra alcohol, making it difficult to determine what they knowingly drank.
"You have to think about your blood-alcohol level, the last time you drank, how much you had to eat the previous day, your normal alcohol consumption
"That would be quite challenging to unpick, so the busy emergency department probably isn’t the right place for that to happen," he explained.
A test centre for spiking victims in Bristol
Dr Roberts said he thought a special testing centre could help give victims of spiking some clarity and certainty.
"What we believe is that there should probably be some sort of community pathway available where you can get tested the next morning at 8am for a range of substances.
"But it’s all about the psychological support as well. It’s our role to promote this and to think about what’s best for patients in the long-run.
"People come to the emergency department because these things happen on a Friday night, Saturday night and we’re the only place open.
"So we’re nowhere near a solution yet, because it all comes down to 'who’s going to fund a service that doesn’t already exist - in the current economic climate?'"
No record of new drugs being used
Dr Roberts added that, without regularly testing of spiking victims, it's difficult to spot emerging trends in which drugs are being used, or to identify new substances.
He explained: "Because we don’t test, we don’t know what the problem is.
"We get people saying ‘I’ve been spiked’ and we say ‘okay, we understand’ and then we manage them appropriately, but what we don’t do is routinely measure it.
"So, we’ve got no idea, A - what’s been used to spike people, and B - how big the problem is. There’s huge scope for more research. We’d like to do some more where we trial testing and review what difference it makes.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this report, there is help available to you. Visit the Stamp Out Spiking charity for support, resources and guidance. If you believe you have been a victim of crime, contact your local police force to report it.
"But that’s difficult research to do because the patients arrive in the middle of the night and they mightn’t have the capacity to consent to testing.
"So even doing research in this area isn’t straightforward, but it’s something we’re actively looking to do."
In April 2022, the UK Home Affairs Committee published a report on spiking. The inquiry heard the results from a YouGov poll of 1,693 adults in which 11% of women and 6% of men reported having been a victim of spiking.
It also surveyed 1,895 victims, with 553 reporting mental health consequences and 292 physical health consequences of the event.
In 2022, The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) issued a response to this report that recognised spiking "can cause serious distress and harm to victims and cause lasting damage to their mental, and in some cases, physical health".
RCEM also acknowledged that "emergency departments are not able to provide forensic medical investigation and [it welcomed] the committee’s recognition that alternative environments to allow proper investigation must be made available".