Hazardous alcohol use and alcohol use disorder interventions in somatic hospital wards: Who are we able to detect?

Background: Despite four decades of research demonstrating strong evidence for  screening and brief interventions (SBI) for hazardous alcohol use and AUD, it is currently unknown which SBI methods are being used in Norwegian Hospitals. Additionally, past research has focused on the effect of SBIs, less focus is shed on who different SBI methods are actually able detect. The aim of this study is to describe the different SBI strategies in place in Norwegian somatic hospital wards, and describe the patients they detect, and their trajectories (disease burden, healthcare use and prescription use. 

Methods: This multi centre study collected data from 7 differnt Nowegian Hospitals throughout Norway. Under a hospital admission to a somatic ward, where the healthcare personnell suspected alcohol was a contributing factor to the admission, they 1) addressed alcohol, 2)established there was a problem and 3) offered some sort of intervention. The content within these three categories were up to each hospital and was not in any way manipulated by this study. Thus, the different hospitals had somewhat different strategies. In addition to hospital and demographic information, the participants completed the AUDIT-C in addition to item 10 in the full AUDIT. These patient data will be linked to Norwegian national registries three years retrospectively and prospectively, to enable descriptions of disease burden, healthcare utilization and prescription use and mortality. 

Results: Findings from this ongoing study will be presented at the conference. 

Conclusions: The findings from the present observational multi-centre study will give unique insight into what kind of patients different SBI methods are able to identify in somatic hospital wards, and their trajectories prior to and following a hospital admission where alcohol was addressed. This may have great clinical implication for future practice.