3. Alcohol brief advice

Updated 23 May 2024

Core principles of CICA

  • An alcohol health champion's role to offer informal, brief alcohol advice is provided face to face to individuals within the community where they live or work
  • Alcohol health champions (AHCs), with support from their coordinators, are responsible for deciding exactly how to operationalise their advice-giving role
  • Examples included opportunistic conversations with friends, families, colleagues or community members, as well as more planned activities such as staffing stalls at drop-in community events
  • AHCs are free to do whatever they were comfortable with; the programme does not dictate where, when or how much activity should take place
  • Supplies of the alcohol harm assessment tool, Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test – consumption (AUDIT-C), in scratchcard form, are made available to AHCs to support them with informal, brief advice conversations

Evaluation recommendations

  • Focus the brief advice component of the intervention on the majority of people who use alcohol who are not alcohol dependent/in highest need. There needs to be a conscious effort to re-iterate this during set up, training and ongoing support
  • Use a systems approach to consider the whole alcohol treatment system as part of the wider infrastructure of support, inclusive of population-based health promotion and prevention
  • See Evaluation design for recommendations for future research

Representatives from the Manchester CICA team share their experiences of what worked well for them in this two minute video.

In this 5 minute presentation, Suzy Hargreaves explores how newly trained alcohol health champions perceived and understood their AHC role.

Where to find published research findings

Ure C, Burns L, Hargreaves SC, Coffey M, Audrey S, Kenth K, et al. Mobilising communities to address alcohol harm: an Alcohol Health Champion approach. Perspectives in Public Health 2020; 140(2):88–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/175791...

Hargreaves SC, Ure C, Burns EJ, Coffey M, Audrey S, Ardern K, Cook PA. A mixed-methods analysis evaluating an alcohol health champion community intervention: how do newly trained champions perceive and understand their training and role? Health and Social Care in the Community 2022; 30(5):e2737–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.13...

Burns EJ, de Vocht F, Teixeira Siqueira N, Ure C, Audrey S, Coffey M, et al. An ‘alcohol health champions’ intervention to reduce alcohol harm in local communities: a mixed-methods evaluation of a natural experiment. Public Health Research (in press)