After meeting with police and local drug experts to hear about the effect the highly-addictive drug was having on communities, Ms Goward elaborated on the government’s pre-election pledge of $4 million over four years for non-government organisations (NGOs) to partner with local health districts to deliver ice treatment services tailored to the needs of individual communities in rural and regional NSW.

Tenders would open in September and contracts would be awarded by December, she said.

Ms Goward said the strategy would seek to address “the tyranny of distance”.

“The very intensive solutions you find in St Vincent’s Hospital and metropolitan Sydney just won’t work in areas like the Dubbo region where you have a number of smaller communities but with a relatively high incidence of ice use and abuse,” she said.

“If we’re going to rely on people to come to one centre, the only way they’re going to do that is in a paddy wagon or the back of an ambulance. To get people to voluntarily be part of the treatment, you have to go to them.

“If you’re living two kilometres away, it’s one thing. If you’re living 800 kilometres away and you haven’t got a car and your family want to be with you... then your chances of getting people to voluntarily be involved in rehabilitation are severely reduced. 

“We have to work out clever ways of taking services to people in their local communities where they have their family and support, and indeed where they have to live with the temptations that took them to ice in the first place.”

Dubbo MP Troy Grant said the health-specific response was part of a whole-of-government approach to tackle ice manufacture, supply and use.

That included the NSW Department of Justice “scoping out” the idea of establishing a drug court at Dubbo that would include “elements of justice, health, probation and parole”, he said.

Mr Grant said many people mistakenly equated rehabilitation with a single physical location, such as a centralised treatment centre.

“If you’re going to pack somebody up and take them off to a bricks and mortar facility all the time, their chances of rehabilitation or success are significantly diminished,” he said.

“If you can try to rehabilitate them and provide that service closer to their home environment, you often have a greater success.

“We can’t have a rehabilitation centre in every single community in NSW, that’s a reality, this is significant funding to take the services to communities that need it most.”

While the design process for programs to be jointly delivered by the health service and NGOs was in its infancy, Mr Grant said “one size did not fit all” so the programs would be flexible to meet local needs.

“In every community forum, the communities have said to us they want local solutions,” he said.

“Here is the specialist funding that will be designed to meet those local needs, but be different across the state. 

“We’re not going to have some sort of model dumped on us, saying this is going to fix all your problems.”

Western NSW Local Health District (LHD) chief executive Scott McLachlan said just locating services in the hubs of Dubbo and/or Orange was not a region-wide solution.

“We know ice and drug and alcohol issues in general affect every community,” he said.

“Front and centre of our mind is how we support every town, all their health workers and other services like the police.”