ECOWAS members have agreed to set up a regional network of treatment experts for substance use disorders. 

This comes days after the ECOWAS commission organized an online capacity building workshop for experts to design a quality assurance framework and treatment guidelines for substance use disorders. 

The delegates made presentations on the current state of treatment services as it relates to substance use disorders in their respective countries, while the topics covered at the workshop included the principles of timely access to evidence-based treatment interventions, promotion of patient health, safety and human rights, as well as practice exercises on scoring of timely access to evidence-based treatment interventions

At the end of the workshop, the experts adopted and endorsed the acronym WANATe, which stands for West African Network of Addiction Treatment Experts.