Testing KASPR: A New Assessment Tool for Ketamine Use
- Phil Harris
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
Ketamine use continues to present a growing challenge across services. One of the consistent issues raised by practitioners is that ketamine does not sit comfortably within existing substance misuse frameworks. Presentations often involve a mix of psychological drivers, complex patterns of use, and increasingly significant physical harm — particularly urological symptoms — that are not well captured by standard assessment tools.
This creates a particular problem across different professional groups, where the same individual may be understood differently depending on the setting.
This includes practitioners working in:
Substance use services
Mental health services
Housing and homelessness services
Youth services
Criminal justice settings
Primary and secondary healthcare
In response to this gap, we have developed KASPR (Ketamine Assessment of Severity, Pattern and Risk).
KASPR is a structured assessment tool designed to bring greater clarity and consistency to how ketamine use is understood in practice. It focuses on three core domains:
Exposure — patterns, frequency, and routes of use
Drivers — psychological and social factors influencing use
Harm — physical and functional impact, including emerging health complications
The intention is not to replace practitioner judgement, but to support it — providing a common framework that helps different professionals arrive at more consistent clinical understanding.
What we are currently testing
We are currently running an early inter-rater reliability exercise.
The aim is simple:
To test whether KASPR leads to consistent scoring across practitioners working in different roles and settings — including substance use, mental health, housing, youth services, criminal justice, and healthcare.
This is important. If a tool is to be useful in real-world settings, it needs to produce similar interpretations regardless of professional background.
It is also important to be clear:
This is not a test of the practitioner — it is a test of the tool.
What participation involves
The exercise is based on 8 short case studies, designed to explore how the tool performs across a range of presentations, including more complex and ambiguous cases.
Participants are asked to apply the KASPR framework to each case.
The exercise takes approximately 30 minutes to complete
It is designed to be practical and clinically grounded
No specialist training in KASPR is required
Click the link below to trial KASPR
What happens next
We are currently expanding our initial sample to strengthen the findings from this early phase.
Following this, a larger-scale pilot across services will be launched, with a focus on embedding KASPR within real-world practice and linking assessment more directly to intervention pathways.
Get involved
If you work with individuals where substance use or complexity is part of the picture — in any of the roles outlined above — your input would be extremely valuable.
Taking part at this stage helps ensure the tool works across services, not just within one discipline.
If you would like to take part, please get in touch and we will send the materials across.
Early findings will be shared with contributors.
KASPR is being developed to support clearer, more consistent responses to ketamine use across systems. This early phase is about testing whether it can deliver on that aim.
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