Alcoholics Anonymous Reviews

Services which help people with alcohol problems are at breaking point because of the sheer number of heavy drinkers in the Bradford district.

The huge demand is outweighing capacity, a special committee set up to identify the scale of alcohol abuse was warned.

Alcohol misuse causes about 200 premature deaths in the Bradford district each year and 5.2 per cent of the population is dependent on alcohol.

About 84,000 people in the Bradford area are drinking above the sensible drinking limits and one in three cancer deaths can be attributed to alcohol misuse.

Gary Malcolmson, of the Bradford-based Piccadilly Project, which is the only service in the city which deals solely with people with alcohol problems, told councillors yesterday that it was a constant battle to get people the help they needed.

The Piccadilly Project is now helping 200 people through a range of interventions, and receives about 120 new referrals every three months.

However, it has to limit its work to the city centre and to people over the age of 18 because of a shortage of workers and service capacity.

At a meeting of the sub-committee tasked with investigating alcohol misuse, Mr Malcolmson said the project would like to help people from the age of 16 and carry out more out-reach work to target hard to reach communities.

He said: "Residential rehab can take a number of weeks to secure, which impacts negatively on physical and mental well-being.

"It is a constant problem we are battling against. There are only a handful of beds for Bradford."

He called for in-patient detoxification programmes to be expanded and for service capacity levels to be increased.

"Need is outweighing service capacity," he warned.

Graham Mynott, who has overseen the introduction of a specialist drug and alcohol worker at Keyhouse, a 12-bed hostel for homeless young people in Keighley which houses about 100 to 150 people a year, told the sub-committee 70 per cent of its residents needed help for alcohol and drug problems.

Many of the young people, aged 16 to 25, said they binge drank due to boredom.

Mr Mynott, said the project, which is being funded for two years by Comic Relief, had been very successful in engaging with a hard-to-reach group.

However, he also told of the problem of securing cash to continue the Keyhouse project when funding runs out in December.

Nina Smith, senior policy officer on drugs and alcohol for Bradford Council, said women were now drinking at much higher levels than ever before and the Harrogate phenomenon' was being replicated in wealthier areas of the district, such as Ilkley, where more people were suffering alcohol problems.

She said the rising tide of alcohol misuse was also being fuelled by supermarkets selling cheap alcohol, such as two litres of cider for as little as £1.89.

"You could buy 50 units of alcohol for £5," she said. The safe level for women is 14 units a week and 21 for men.

Susan Gee, manager of the Council's occupational health unit, said more and more Council workers were being referred to the unit where the underpinning problem was alcohol.

"It is a serious problem," she said.

"The heaviest drinkers tend to be concentrated in people of working age. Around three to five per cent of the workforce are alcohol dependent.

"We have a number of employees whose lives have been in absolute ruin because of alcohol."

The Council has set up a working group to examine whether an alcohol policy should be introduced for the authority's 21,000 workforce, of which it is estimated 700 to 800 could be dependent on alcohol.

It could mean the introduction of testing for alcohol misuse among workers at all levels, however Mrs Gee said the authority did not have the resources to deal with such a policy and a possible surge of people coming forward for help.

"Bradford has excellent services on the NHS but not a lot of it is available and to be treated privately is very expensive. We have to accept that access to help is limited," she said.

Bradford Telegraph and Argus