Projects & Research Partnerships

Introduction

Alcohol is a major public health problem. In the UK, there were 8,416 deaths and over a million hospital admissions due to alcohol in 2013. Treating alcohol-related problems costs the NHS approximately £3.5 billion a year.

Internationally, a common approach to reducing alcohol consumption is to publish low risk drinking guidelines. These aim to tell the public about the risks of drinking above a particular amount of alcohol and encourage healthier drinking behaviours. Drinking guidelines are promoted in various ways including TV advertising campaigns, putting information on bottle labels and by doctors discussing drinking with their patients.

Despite their widespread use, little is known about whether promoting drinking guidelines affects people's behaviour or how they think about alcohol. Research opportunities are rare as drinking guidelines are not updated very often and the last UK revisions occurred in 1995. However, in 2012, the UK Government's Alcohol Strategy announced that the country's drinking guidelines would be reviewed. That review is ongoing and new drinking guidelines may be published in early 2016.

Evaluating the impact of promoting new drinking guidelines

We propose to evaluate what impact promoting the new drinking guidelines has on the alcohol consumption of adults living in England. We will also examine whether there are any impacts on the way people think about alcohol (e.g. their knowledge of the risks of heavy drinking or how motivated they feel to drink less). The way people think about alcohol is important as changing this may be a first step to changing behaviour.

Information on the impacts of promoting revised drinking guidelines will come from survey data collected each month between March 2014 and October 2017. We will examine whether there are changes over time in how much people drink or in the way they think about alcohol. We will also collect data on which activities promoting the drinking guidelines occur using interviews with people like NHS managers, Public Health England and alcohol charities. This information will be used to examine whether promotional activities coincide with changes in the survey data.

A discussion group of adult drinkers from the general public has been established by the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies. This group will be asked to contribute to the project by, for example, advising on survey questions and suggesting additional areas for research based on the guidelines that are published and the promotional activity that occurs. The discussion group will also be asked to contribute to the interpretation of findings and identifying the key messages which should be communicated from the project.