The Alcohol Identification and Brief Advice e-learning project (Alcohol IBA) helps professionals with identifying those individuals whose drinking might be impacting on their health and delivering simple, structured advice. Courses cover delivering alcohol IBA in 3 settings: Primary Care, Community Pharmacy and Hospitals. The Primary Care and Pharmacy courses have been developed by e-Learning for Healthcare (e-LfH) and the Department of Health's Alcohol Policy Team. The hospital settings course was developed by e-LfH and NHS Portsmouth with funding and learning materials contributed by the Department of Health.
Alcohol IBA can be effectively delivered for a wide range of healthcare professionals, such as GPs, practice nurses, pharmacists and nurses. The courses have been designed to provide the skills and understanding to deliver IBA in line with the National Occupational Standard AH10 - 'employ techniques to help individuals adopt sensible drinking behaviour'.
Users learn how to use World Health Organisation validate tools to identify patients' levels of health risk from alcohol and how to intervene appropriately with those who could benefit from cutting down. The curriculum is based on the robust evidence-base of 56 controlled trials over 30 years which show that five minutes of strucutred, motivational advice is effective in reducing health risks from alcohol in 1 in 8 recipients. If appropriately targeted and competently delivered, it will return a net saving by reducing the incident of chronic conditions such as hypertension, CHD and many others to which alcohol is known to contribute. Widespread use of IBA is therefore recognised as a contributor to QIPP improvements and efficiency savings.
