Reducción de daños asociados al consumo inyectado de drogas en población sin-hogar: propuesta para una intervención grupal a través de WhatsApp

All the policies, services, programmes and actions aimed at reducing the negative effects of drug consumption when the consumer does not wish to quit consumption, are called harm reduction. Historically, most of these interventions have been aimed at parenteral drug users. This is due to the epidemic nature of illnesses such as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syn-drome, or the Hepatitis C Syndrome, whose main contagion mechanism is sharing injecting material, and also the risk of overdose associated to this type of consumption.The groups which are more vulnerable to suffering addiction issues and their re-lated harm are the people experiencing homelessness. In the investigation conducted in order to design more efficient preventive interventions, it has been observed that there exist great opportunities to use Smartphones to develop distance interventions among homeless people with mental disorders, including those related to substance abuse. This work explores the possibilities of developing an on line intervention to reduce the princi-pal harm associated to injected drug consumption among homeless people, in particular through the Whatsapp application for mobile phones. The reading of scientific literature indicates that the main advantages associated to this type of intervention are the im-provement in the access to services, due to the inherent barriers to institutions and also to those associated to users, and the possibilities in the management of communication with intervention agents. There exist great possibilities to develop this proposal of intervention from specialised public services