ArticleAlcohol and alcoholism (Oxford, Oxfordshire)2021
The Frequency and Content of Discussions About Alcohol Use in Primary Care and Application of the Chief Medical Officer's Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines: A Cross-Sectional Survey of General Practitioners and Practice Nurses in the UK.
Article in Alcohol and alcoholism (Oxford, Oxfordshire), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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1 citing paper in PubMed, 3 citations in OpenAlex.
- Associations of alcohol drinking with incident dementia: a prospective study from the UK Biobank.European journal of epidemiology · 2025Observational
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
aimsTo examine how often general practitioners (GPs) and practice nurses (PNs) working in primary care discuss alcohol with patients, what factors prompt discussions, how they approach patient discussions and whether the Chief Medical Officers' (CMO) revised low-risk drinking guidelines are appropriately advised.
methodsCross-sectional survey with GPs and PNs working in primary care in the UK, conducted January-March 2017 (n = 2020). A vignette exercise examined what factors would prompt a discussion about alcohol, whether they would discuss before or after a patient reported exceeded the revised CMO guidelines (14 units per week) and whether the CMO drinking guidelines were appropriately advised. For all patients, participants were asked how often they discussed alcohol and how they approached the discussion (e.g. used screening tool).
resultsThe most common prompts to discuss alcohol in the vignette exercise were physical cues (44.7% of participants) or alcohol-related symptoms (23.8%). Most practitioners (70.1%) said they would wait until a patient was exceeding CMO guidelines before instigating discussion. Two-fifths (38.1%) appropriately advised the CMO guidelines in the vignette exercise, with PNs less likely to do so than GPs (odds ratio [OR] = 0.77, P = 0.03). Less than half (44.7%) reportedly asked about alcohol always/often with all patients, with PNs more likely to ask always/often than GPs (OR = 2.22, P < 0.001). Almost three-quarters said they would enquire by asking about units (70.3%), compared to using screening tools.
conclusionFurther research is required to identify mechanisms to increase the frequency of discussions about alcohol and appropriate recommendation of the CMO drinking guidelines to patients.
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