Walk the walk, putting a quality indicator for alcohol care into practice.

Background: Since 2016 our hospital implemented quality indicators (QI). Based on our previous development of QI’s on continuing care for patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD), we chose the process of care QI: 'The proportion of patients that during the process of detoxification is informed about the importance of long-lasting involvement in treatment'.

Methods: We calculated the percentage of patients receiving alcohol information (participant list of group sessions and appointment list of individual alcohol educators), in reference to the total number of patients hospitalized for alcohol detoxification (for whom alcohol substitution medication was prescribed, but not necessarily administered). Of this number (n=109), we excluded patients with severe mental retardation or cognitive damage (n=5) that could hinder understanding of psychoeducation. We also excluded patients with comorbid psychosis (n=0) and readmissions within the year (n=5).

Results: In 2017, we obtained 68,7%. The subsequent years the percentage did not augment: 68,9% (2018), and 64,8% (2019). However, we have to take into account that from 2018 our pre-agreed hospitalization time halved from two weeks to one. Maintaining those alcohol-education numbers comparable to baseline year 2017, can thus be seen as an improvement of our team’s efficiency in giving alcohol education in a timely fashion. In order to do so, more nurses where trained to give individual sessions and a lab top was acquired to support them. We also reduced the 4 different group sessions to 3, this way more people benefited from all sessions during their stay.

Conclusion: Alcohol-education increases disease insight and engagement, and can makes patients more resilient to re-use. We experienced that measuring this indicator, and more importantly communicating the percentages within our team, kept us thinking of every possible way to improve those. Thus demonstrating the importance of developing indicators (talking the talk) but even more so, implementing them (walking the walk).