Frontline staff 'need' training to tackle alcohol misuse

Providing frontline NHS staff with basic knowledge about the social and physical effects of alcohol misuse could save large amounts of money and resources, doctors claim in this week's British Medical Journal (BMJ).

It is estimated that in 2004, 38 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women aged between 16 and 64 had an alcohol use disorder, equivalent to roughly 8.2 million people.

About £217 million is currently spent on targeting this, compared to the estimated £20 billion cost of alcohol misuse.

Writing in the BMJ, Robin Touquet, emergency medicine consultant of St Mary's hospital and Imperial College, London, and Alex Paton, a retired consultant physician, question whether £3.2 million recently made available by the government for initiatives to help people with alcohol will be effectively spent.

"We hope that some of the new money will be used to support those clinical settings in which alcohol misuse is common and detection and intervention are most likely to be rewarding – for example, in hospital emergency departments, general practices, and hospital wards," they write.

The doctors express concern that alcohol services tend to be "fragmented", as specialist alcohol units are "controlled by mental health trusts, which are separated administratively from acute hospital trusts".

They propose that alcohol services could be improved by placing more funding for hospital emergency departments, where over one third of overall attendances are alcohol-related, with two-thirds occurring after midnight.

"If all frontline staff had basic knowledge about the social and physical ill effects of and the detection of alcohol misuse, and the benefits of brief advice and liaison with alcohol health workers, problems would be tackled far earlier – often preventing the development of dependence – and large amounts of money would be saved," Drs Touquet and Paton add.

They conclude that the new two-year foundation training for junior doctors offers an important opportunity to develop such knowledge.

In The News