Recent bulletins from the Findings drug and alcohol bank:
‘My GP says I drink too much’: screening and brief intervention
In the absence of greater obstacles to availability, widespread screening to identify and then briefly advise risky drinkers has been the great hope for improved alcohol-related public health. This major hot topic update guides you through the studies which exposed questionable effectiveness and patchy implementation, leading to today’s less ambitious plans.
GP-delivered brief interventions an ‘important piece of the alcohol policy jigsaw’
Doctors working in Scotland share their thoughts on what helps and hinders the delivery of brief alcohol interventions in general practice. Stifled by short consultation times and faced by a lack of awareness among patients of what constitutes harmful/hazardous drinking, doctors face numerous challenges to embedding these interventions in routine practice despite or regardless of their enthusiasm.
‘Cycle of Change’: change promoter or benevolent fiction?
Matching interventions to the client’s stage usually doesn’t help, and it only a describes one sort of change process which perhaps is not the most important kind, but there may still be reasons to retain Prochaska and DiClemente’s ubiquitous Cycle of Change model.
‘Wrap-around’ care in substance use treatment
Given the multiple, severe, and overlapping problems presented by drug and alcohol treatment caseloads, it seems obvious that a holistic approach would help get patients back on a stable (recovery) footing, and similarly obvious that just focusing on substance use objectives would be setting some patients up to fail. Could ‘wrap-around’ care be a realistic option – even in the ‘austere’ UK financial climate – and should treatment services have the flexibility to determine the extent to which this would be implemented in practice, or would this risk a lottery of comprehensive care?
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