House of Commons Health Committee launches report on alcohol

Published: 11 January 2010

Alcohol continues to be big news in the media with a recent return to the debate about increasing the price of alcohol in order to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed. If anyone reading this has been around the addiction field for a while they will know that this is in no way a new debate. This issue was raised by Griffith Edwards as part of his World Health Organisation Report Alcohol policy and the public good (1994) which first produced the research evidence to say that a rise in alcohol prices is likely to lead to a reduction in alcohol consumption at the national level.

However this argument again appears to be gaining in strength, and the latest of example of this is this House of Commons Health Committee First Report: Alcohol. I appreciate that reports can often make for challenging reading, but I would recomend at least having a look at this one. As it is a report of a select committe it contains the proceedings of the committee, which means there are quotes of conversations in the report. Certainly for me this makes this a less "dry" read than reports can sometimes be and somehow brings this more "to life" when reading it.   

You can read the report on the Parliament website.

Whilst the media appear to have picked up mainly on the element of the report which calls for an adjustment to alcohol pricing (as seen on the BBC Breakfast programme on the morning of 8 January 2010), there is much more to this report than simply alcohol pricing. It takes a detailed look at how the situation with alcohol has reached this point and what we can do to improve this. 

For example, there are interesting sections looking at not only what the problems we are facing consist of through discussion of impact on the NHS from A&E to liver units. There is also a good discussion about ways in which the current picture of alcohol related harms can be improved. 

The final recomendations include an emphasis on further expansion of early recognition and treatment of people with alcohol issues, to try and address the issue at an individual level early on.

There is also a recognition of the significant difference that alcohol specialist nurses make to the treatment and care of people with alcohol problems upon entering hospital. 

The recomendation that I think many people who work in the alcohol/addiction field will welcome is the one which states that "access to community based alcohol treatment... should  be at least comparable to treatment for illegal drug addiction". However as always the concern will be where the funding for this development will come from.