Managing alcohol-related attendances in emergency care: can diversion to bespoke services lessen the burden?

Abstract

Acute alcohol intoxication (AAI) has a long history of burdening emergency care services. Healthcare systems around the world have explored a variety of different services that divert AAI away from EDs to better manage their condition. Little formal evaluation has been undertaken, particularly in the UK where alcohol misuse is one of the highest in the world. In this article, we outline a brief history of diversionary services, introduce the concept of Alcohol Intoxication Management Services (AIMS) and describe examples of AIMS in the UK. We then describe Evaluating the Diversion of Alcohol-Related Attendances, a natural experiment including six cities with AIMS compared with six cities without, that involves an ethnographic study, records patient experiences in both AIMS and EDs, assesses impact on key performance indicators in healthcare and evaluates the cost-effectiveness of AIMS.

Metadata

Authors/Creators:

Irving, A. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1175-716X
Goodacre, S. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0803-8444
Blake, J.
Allen, D.
Moore, S.C.

© 2017 Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article). This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Keywords:

alcohol abuse; clinical management; emergency care systems; emergency department utilisation; emergency departments; prehospital care

Dates: