Programme summary

This programme is designed to support the National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for England which has called for “more information…on the most effective methods of targeted screening and brief interventions, and whether the successes shown in research studies can be replicated within the health system in England.” Further, the strategy charges the Department of Health “to set up a number of pilot schemes by Q1/2005 to test how best to use a variety of models of targeted screening and brief intervention in primary and secondary healthcare settings, focusing particularly on value for money and mainstreaming.” This programme has three linked clinical trials: PHC, AED, and CJS; designed to provide evidence on the delivery, effectiveness and cost effectiveness of a range of alcohol screening and brief intervention approaches across settings and regions in England.

All the programme elements together will lead to the following outputs: 6 monthly interim reports describing progress and early lessons learned from the pilots; a final report to the Department of Health with an accessible summary for a wide audience in the field; a toolkit of validated screening and brief intervention packages appropriate to various settings and protocols for their use. Subject to agreement with the Department of Health we aim to publish the findings in academic journals and present the findings at local, national and international meetings.

The programme is managed by a project management group, and has established a steering group of key stakeholders to advise and support the development of the trials. Each programme element has staff dedicated to its implementation and with key individuals responsible for coordination of the overall programme and each element to ensure successful delivery.

The whole programme will take place over 2 years and will be the largest alcohol screening and brief intervention pilot study so far conducted in the UK. The programme will address key gaps in the current evidence base on screening and brief intervention and should provide invaluable information to guide further development and implementation of the National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy in England.

INEBRIA conference

We have presented some preliminary findings at the 6th Annual Conference of INEBRIA which took place at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK on 7th-9th October, 2009.

You can download the presentations by clicking the links below:

Research update

(01-09-09)

We have recruited all 51 research sites, trained 250 Accident and Emergency staff across the 9 hospitals involved in the study and 189 primary care staff across the 24 GP surgeries, as well as 96 offender managers in the probation service. It has been a long and fruitful exercise which has led to the first report to the Department of Health, on the training of alcohol screening and brief intervention in healthcare and CJS settings.

The training tools as well as the screening and intervention tools we use in SIPS are now available to download from this website.

Following some changes to the research protocol in both A&E, PHC and CJS trials we have managed to complete recruitment. For the past few months our Alcohol Health Workers have been supporting the research activities and the screening and delivering of the interventions in some A&E Departments, PHC and CJS settings.

These changes have been successful, and as a consequence more cases in both trials have now been recruited.

In October 08 we also started the 6-month follow-up interviews, and currently 80% of those due have been followed up; and we have received further funding from the Department of Health to conduct 12-month follow-ups, which have already started.

Click here to download the latest SIPS Newsletter.(November 2008)