1. Co-design and prepare for roll-out

Core principles of CICA

• Alcohol health champions (AHCs) are lay individuals who share the common place-based characteristic that they live or work within a chosen area. 
• Volunteers are adults aged 18 years and over, and are embedded in the community either through their residency or their work role
• CICA coordinators are paid professionals working in the chosen place-based area, employed by the local authority, private or voluntary sector, commissioned to provide health and well-being services or alcohol and drug treatment services
• Using a cascade training model, CICA coordinators recruit, train, and support lay volunteers from place-based areas
• First generation volunteers and CICA coordinators attend an accredited and standardised two-day Train-the-Trainer course with the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), including half a day with a local alcohol licensing officer
• Second generation volunteer AHCs attend a one-and-a-half day cascade training course delivered by a local CICA coordinator (including half a day with a local alcohol licensing officer)

Evaluation recommendations:

• Ensure all stakeholders have a clear understanding of the place-based ‘role’ being implemented, including its scope and purpose
• Ensure providers or commissioned services have a clear understanding of their own role; the anticipated outcomes; and, the skills and capacity to support inexperienced alcohol/health issue focused volunteer groups
• Prepare the ground at community level, well in advance of a formal implementation period, to build community understanding, support, and involvement to aid recruitment at the appropriate time
• Develop and resource a multi-pronged recruitment strategy utilising digital technologies, social media, community influencers, leaflets/posters and word-of-mouth
• Be prepared for a longer/sustained period of supporting new champions—especially since the aim is to target areas of high need where existing levels of confidence and literacy might be low
• Map potential unintended consequences to create a dark logic model, particularly taking into account the tendency to ‘other’ the issue of alcohol and how to minimise this in design

The Wigan CICA team share their experiences of how they designed CICA in their chosen areas and what worked well for them in this short video.

In this 5 minute presentation, Dr Cathy Ure shares key findings about the initial implementation stage of CICA, including barriers and enablers to roll-out.

Where to find published research findings

Ure C, Hargreaves SC, Burns EJ, Coffey M, Audrey S, Ardern K, Cook PA. An asset-based community development approach to reducing alcohol harm: exploring barriers and facilitators to community mobilisation at initial implementation stage. Health & Place 2021; 68:102504. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2020.102504

Burns EJ, Hargreaves SC, Ure C, Hare S, Coffey M, Hidajat M, et al. ‘A priori’ external contextual factors and relationships with process indicators: a mixed-methods study of the pre-implementation phase of ‘Communities in Charge of Alcohol’. BMC Public Health 2022; 22(1):2224. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889...

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)