Intervention alcohol: addressing alcohol related issues

Foreword

Stephen Battersby,

President, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health

Alcohol has been called the social drug. It is a lawful, familiar and accessible product that most of us use in a responsible way. However the damage its misuse can cause is also apparent – causing harm to the physical and mental health of those who use it to excess and undermining families, communities, the economy and wellbeing.

Tackling the problems caused by misuse of alcohol is not straightforward, and it is certainly one that is to large and too complex for any one group and responses have to match the many ways in which alcohol and its misuse affect us.. Environmental Health Practitioners and their local authority colleagues can play a valuable role in this agenda, working with the medical profession, police and with others from the alcohol industry to promote and deliver the appropriate responses so that we can prevent problems and address them when they arise .

This toolkit contains 10 interventions, each of which addresses one alcohol related issue. They are delivered by local authorities working with a variety of partner organisations, and either address problems before they have chance to arise through education or tackle issues that have emerged by providing deliverable and cost effective solutions. All of them have been piloted and all of them work. The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health is very grateful to those local authorities and other organisations that created the initiatives for allowing us to collate and share them in this toolkit.

I warmly welcome this toolkit and commend it to you. Please use it and further, please share it with colleagues in your organisation and wider. I hope you will find it invaluable in your future work tackling alcohol misuse.