Women’s Treatment Working Group

Women who want to change the way they use drugs and alcohol have different needs to men. These include greater stigma attached to their drug and alcohol use, experiences of gender based violence and trauma, and caring responsibilities.

The Women’s Treatment Working Group is a group of women in leadership roles, working together to improve support for women affected by drug and alcohol use. We come from both specialist and mainstream services and are united in challenging inequality and enhancing services for women. We are committed to learning from lived and living experience, and we aim to work alongside women to create real change.

In February 2022, the newly formed Women’s Treatment Group wrote to the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, highlighting the need to ensure the forthcoming commissioning standards and national outcomes framework reflect fully the specific needs of women, across all elements of their life course, in order to improve outcomes for the women we serve.

Since then, the group has presented at All Party Parliamentary Group meetings, conferences, and delivered webinars for International Women’s Day, about gender-specific treatment needs and frontline service practices.

In September 2025, the group published its WOMANIFESTO, which calls on the Department of Health and Social Care to co-produce a gender-responsive treatment system that reflects the realities of women’s lives. You can find a summary and the full document here.

You can read more about the activities of the group in this guest blog by Hannah Shead who chaired the group until December 2023.

In July 2024 the group called on the new Government to show strong leadership on women’s issues and substance use.

The 2025 IWD webinar is available on YouTube here.

You can read here a blog from the current chair Nic Adamson’s blog about the value of specialist substance use services for women and the importance of partnership whereby different specialisms/professionals collaborate, written in July 2025 in response to the Independent Sentencing Review.

The group is self-facilitated and rotates it chair. It is currently chaired by Nic Adamson, Deputy Chief Executive Officer at Change Grow Live. Collective Voice attends and provides support to the group.
The Terms of Reference can be accessed here.
If you are interested in getting involved in the group, please email [email protected]

Research, guidance and good practice

The rate of both alcohol and drug related deaths in women has increased in recent years. This is a conversation which we all need to be having much more often and, as such, we’ve brought together some of the latest research and information on women’s experiences of treatment, to help providers, commissioners and others to shape future delivery with the specific needs of women more formally in focus.

In this area you’ll find recent research, guidance documents and good practice reports around women’s treatment and recovery in one place. Happy reading!

If you would like to see your report featured here, or if you have feedback on this page please email [email protected].