Public Health England (PHE) has published its 2014 to 2015 business plan, setting out its objectives - including ambitions around alcohol - for the coming year.
PHE has formally been in existence for over a year, taking national lead on the prevention of alcohol health harms, as well as assuming some roles of the former National Treatment Agency (NTA) for substance misuse.
PHE says it will publish a 'Health and Wellbeing Framework for England' in August, which will set out key interventions for improving health and reducing inequalities. The Framework will provide 'a menu of evidence-based interventions' and will aim to ensure effective interventions are 'adopted at scale and pace'. These will most likely include a significant emphasis on alcohol Identification and Brief Advice (IBA), although various efforts at implementation have been underway for some time.
For alcohol, the business plan also sets out to:
- produce a report for government on the public health impact of alcohol and possible evidence-based solutions by Spring 2015
- to review the impact of obesity as a cofactor (with alcohol and hepatitis C) in other long-term liver disease and provide advice on evidence-based interventions and practice
- expand the Longer Lives web tool to include primary care indicators for diabetes (August 2014), health checks (August 2014), cancer and hypertension (October 2014) and measures on drug and alcohol treatment and recovery (December 2014)
Public Health Outcomes Framework
Key to PHE delivery, the Public Health Outcomes Framework (PHOF) has been set up to allow local areas to assess health outcomes across 66 health measures, including 2.18 - Alcohol related admissions to hospital. See here for recent PHOF documents.
The alcohol-related admissions data comes from the well-established LAPE, which now includes a revised approach to recording alcohol-related admissions data. However alcohol's wide ranging impact means alcohol misuse will play a significant role in many of the other indicators.
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