Modelling

Introduction

The development of the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model began with a commission from the Department of Health in 2008 when the University of Sheffield was tasked with conducting a comprehensive review of the relationship between alcohol consumption, pricing and promotion. This initial research laid the foundation for the development of a sophisticated model capable of assessing the impact of various alcohol policies on health, health inequalities, crime, and employment outcomes.

Development of the model

• Version 1.1: The initial version focused on the impact of pricing and promotion policies, including minimum unit pricing (MUP).
• Version 2.0: Expanded the scope to include changes to alcohol availability, restrictions on licensing hours, advertising controls and screening and brief intervention strategies.
• Version 3: Added the capacity to model the differential impact of alcohol policies on socioeconomic groups and so explore the impact of alcohol policy on health inequalities. It also incorporated new evidence on the link between alcohol prices and purchasing and how the price of alcohol in shops changes in response to tax increases.
• Version 4: Introduced a comprehensive review of the evidence linking alcohol consumption and health as well as new evidence on how the price of alcohol in pubs responds to tax increases.

Versions of SAPM have been used to understand the potential impacts of alcohol policies and inform policy debates and decisions in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Canada as well as for Local Authorities in England.

Specific versions of SAPM to model the impact of screening and brief intervention policies have been developed for Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. The components of the model looking at associations between alcohol consumption and health were also adapted to inform the development of low-risk drinking guidelines in both the United Kingdom and Australia.

In 2014 the modelling approach used in the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model was extended to address both alcohol and tobacco policies. This required modelling the dynamics of both alcohol and tobacco consumption and developing new evidence on their relationship. The resulting model is the Sheffield Tobacco and Alcohol Policy Modelling Platform (STAPM), a powerful tool that can examine the impact of alcohol and tobacco policies in isolation, or together, and which can account for interactions between the two behaviours.

Key impacts of the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model

The Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model has made significant contributions to the field of alcohol policy research and has had a substantial impact on public health policy and practice:

Informing policy decisions

• Minimum unit pricing: SAPM has been instrumental in informing the development and implementation of minimum unit pricing (MUP) policies in various jurisdictions.
• Alcohol taxation: The model has been used to assess the impact of different alcohol taxation strategies, such as increasing taxes on specific alcohol types or implementing volumetric taxes.
• Advertising and marketing restrictions: SAPM has helped evaluate the potential impact of restrictions on alcohol advertising and marketing on consumption and related harms.

Shaping public health guidelines

• Low-risk drinking guidelines: Estimates from an adapted version of the model were used to inform the UK Chief Medical Officer's low-risk drinking guidelines.
• Screening and brief interventions: The model has been used to assess the effectiveness of screening and brief intervention programmes in reducing alcohol-related harms.