Recent bulletins from the
drug and alcohol bank:Public health objectives for England including drugs and alcohol
Sets out the structure and objectives of the public health system for England effective from April 2013 and how progress against these objectives will be measured, including addiction treatment completions, alcohol-related hospital admissions, and prisoners identified as needing treatment for alcohol/drug problems.
Seminal studies of the impact of alcohol counsellor skills and support
In the alcohol treatment world, arguably studies don’t get more important than these landmarks in the relatively scarce literature about what makes some alcohol counsellors, therapists and treatment services more effective than others
'Treatment-resistant' skid-row alcoholics react to organised empathy
Later to become founding director of the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, in the late 1950s Dr Morris Chafetz of Massachusetts General Hospital conducted a remarkable series of studies which proved that an alcohol clinic's intake and performance can be transformed by the simple application of empathy and organisation.
Post-emergency visit text message advice moderates drinking
For the first time this US study tried mobile phone text messaging as a way to monitor and moderate the hazardous drinking of young adults screened at emergency departments. Compared to merely monitoring, text-based advice did cut drinking – but why did monitoring-only patients actually start to drink more?
Nurse-led hepatitis education cost-effective way to curb drinking in methadone patients
At Californian methadone clinics, group education sessions led by a nurse and focused on the risks of aggravating hepatitis infection led to the same substantial reductions in drinking as one-to-one or group motivational interviewing conducted by highly trained counsellors, offering a cost-effective means to reduce alcohol-related risks.
