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Good news: the Department of Health’s Alcohol Policy Team is expanding. Two new secondments are being advertised on the NTA website. One is a general Alcohol Advisor (details here); the other is an Alcohol Advisor for the Programme of Improvements (details here). The team at present is Clive Henn, Don Lavoie, Adam Yardley, Paul Maxwell, David Arnold and Iain Armstrong.
Tags
alcohol
alcohol policy
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Further to a post on this subject in September, Tony Goodall (Leeds Alcohol Strategy Lead) reports he is running a series of studies in community pharmacies to examine the role of pharmacists in identifying and intervening opportunistically in hazardous drinking.
The research questions are:
Six Community Pharmacists have agreed to take part. The Pharmacists have counselling experience with smoking cessation work, and will be trained in delivering screening and brief interventions for hazardous drinking. The Pharmacies are in different parts of Leeds, W Yorkshire, serving populations which differ in social class and ethnic background. Each Pharmacy has a consultation room – which is to become a mandatory feature for the provision of advanced services under the new pharmacy contract. The selection of such pharmacists and the types of premises will make the results applicable across all community pharmacies.
The study population is patients, particulalry women, who present with prescriptions for chronic treatment with a potential alcohol interaction, over a three month period.
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Mouth Cancer Awareness Week campaign runs from November 13th to the 19th, with the tagline ‘It Could Be You’. A major part of the campaign is educating people on how they can minimise the risk of developing mouth cancer. The campaign is clear that drinking is a considerable risk factor for mouth cancer, alongside smoking and poor diet.
Campaign details on the British Dental Health Foundation website, Daily Mail story here.
The mouth cancer awareness week guide says this about alcohol:
Although much less documented, alcohol poses almost as big a risk as smoking when it comes to mouth cancer. In addition, because alcohol aids the absorption of tobacco into the mouth, people who smoke and drink alcohol to excess are up to 30 times more likely to develop mouth cancer.
The important thing is not the type of drink that is consumed but the total volume of alcohol.
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Alcohol Concern's annual conference yesterday featured publication of the Alcohol Needs Assessment Research Project, ANARP (which was promised in the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for England). The conference also saw the launch of AC's new 'spend £1 and get £5 free' campaign for investment in specialist treatment, an update on MoCAM, and a keynote speech by public health minister Caroline Flint who promised that:
Over the next few months, we will be offering support by developing tools to assist with assessing the local levels of hazardous, harmful and dependent drinkers and in line with MoCAM, identify gaps in local services.
(see the Department of Health press release here). More of these in later posts.
The needs assessment looked at the prevalence of alcohol disorders in the adult population (age 16 to 64), and at the numbers of specialist alcohol treatment services. It found:
- 38% of men and 6% of women (26% overall) have an alcohol use disorder
- 6% of men and 2% of women are alcohol dependent (3.6% overall)
- Black and minority ethnic groups have a considerably lower prevalence of hazardous/harmful alcohol use but a similar prevalence of alcohol dependence compared with the white population
- There is considerable regional variation in the levels of alcohol related need
- There is considerable ragional variation in the number of agencies - London has the largest number and the North East the fewest
- Approximately 1 in 18 adults with alcohol dependency access treatment per year
Lead author Professor Colin Drummond (St George's, University of London) suggested that a minimum level of provision should be access to treatment for 1 in 10 of alcohol dependent people. In the North West, 1 in 12 access treatment, whilst the ratio for the North East is a staggering 1 in 102.
Some of the findings seem surprising. Why should dependence rates be disproportionately high compared to hazardous/harmful drinking prevalence in London and bme communities? Why aren't people in the North East accessing treatment at similar rates to other regions? Perhaps there is some cultural bias going on here, to do with help seeking. And if it is true that 60% of DATs have an alcohol strategy in place, how did they develop them with no resources?
The research is a clear indication of the poor state of specialist alcohol treatment provision in England but there are no signs of real investment from the government as yet; the field must continue to pin its hopes on the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review (Treasury info on CSR here).
ANARP can be downloaded from here.
Tags
alcohol treatment
alcohol research
alcohol policy
alcohol strategy
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