NHS Launches Gambling Clinic in Southampton

By John Isaac,
Editor at online-gambling.com

John Isaac Editor at online-gambling.com

John Isaac is an editor with many years of experience in the gambling industry. He writes expert articles on card games like blackjack and poker. In addition, he is also well aware of the US gambling laws and the Indian and Dutch gambling markets. You can rely on verified information and insightful details.

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Last updated: December 7, 2022

A new NHS clinic for treating people having gambling problems has been formally opened in Southampton. The clinic is one of the 15 planned by the government in response to an increase in referrals for addiction. It is the first of its kind in Southern England, outside London.

The clinic will take clients from the Isle of Wight and Hampshire. It will later expand to cater for the south east of England. According to Professor Sam Chamberlain, the director of the clinic, there has been an increase in gambling disorders and harms related to gambling in young people, and less than 10% of the cases get treatment eventually.

He added that Southampton has hotspots for gambling – it has several gambling venues in high street locations. As a means of intervention, the NHS pledged in 2019 to open 15 gambling clinics before 2024. So far, it has launched eight – in Sunderland, Stoke, Telford, Leeds, Manchester, two in London, and now in Southampton. The NHS will pay ￡850,000 per year for the Southern Gambling Service, which is situated in College Keep, Southampton.

NHS Says There Is an Increase in Gambling Addiction in England

In November, the National Health Service (NHS) England mentioned that between April and September of this year, the referrals for treatment for gambling addictions increased by 42%. A total of 599 patients were referred within this period. This is more than the 421 patients referred within the same period (April to September) in the previous year.

A gambling peer support worker, Owen Baily, said he had an accelerated recovery from his addiction to gambling when he had CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) at the country’s foremost NHS clinic opened in London in 2011. He added that it is pretty amazing to be free from gambling addictions and that he feels better in comparison to the years he was gambling, where all he experienced was utter devastation.

NHS Stopped Taking Funds from the Gambling Industry

The NHS announced in February that it would stop receiving funds from the gambling industry to treat people with addiction. It will start funding its own gambling-related services. Claire Murdoch, NHS England’s National Mental Health Director, said the NHS is taking this decision because patients were not comfortable with using services that were paid for by the gambling industry. The NHS has already cut ties with GambleAware in the UK due to what they called “close connection” to the gambling industry and not actually protecting problem gamblers.

She mentioned that getting funding from the industry has allowed them to introduce treatment services faster than they usually would have been able to, but that there was a strong desire to move the funding into the general NHS funding.

Claire Murdoch said their clinicians feel that their clinics being funded partly by resources from the gambling industry is a conflict of interest. This is coming more than a year after Ms Murdoch mentioned to the Guardian that gambling companies should be subject to a mandatory levy to fund treatment since the NHS was left to “pick up the pieces”. However, this is indeed a good step towards protecting people from problem gambling.