The Alcohol Identification and Brief Advice e-learning project (Alcohol IBA) helps professionals with identifying those individuals whose drinking might be impacting on their health and delivering simple, structured advice. It has been developed in partnership with e-Learning for Healthcare (e-LfH) and the Department of Health’s Alcohol Policy Team.
Alcohol IBA is appropriate for a wide range of healthcare and other professionals, such as GPs, practice nurses, pharmacists and social workers. It has been designed to provide the skills and understanding to deliver IBA in line with the National Occupational Standard AH10 –‘employ techniques to help individuals adopt sensible drinking behaviour’.
The course teaches users how to use World Health Organisation validated tools to identify patients’ levels of health risk from alcohol and how to intervene appropriately with those who could benefit from cutting down. The curriculum is based on the robust evidence-base of 56 controlled trials over 30 years which show that five minutes of structured, motivational advice is effective in reducing health risks from alcohol in 1 in 8 recipients.
Accessed through the Alcohol Learning Centre website, Alcohol IBA supports the Department of Health’s Alcohol Improvement Programme which was set up to reduce the wide range of health harms to which alcohol misuse contributes.
For more information and to view the e-learning visit www.alcohollearningcentre.org/eLearning/IBA
