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ARTICLE ON ALCOHOL AUDIT 2018 AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Dr. Muhammad Iftikhar and Dr. Ghosh Deb

Objectives:It is recommended that all patients clerked during A&E assessment should be asked for alcohol consumption history and positive cases should be identified at same time. This study explored about percentage of patients who are missed for alcohol consumption history and indirectly do not get support for alcohol cutdown. We suggested at the end of this Audit, that old AUDIT-C forms printed in A/E clerking forms should be replaced by new AUDIT C forms, and should be filled by patients rather than junior doctors. Design:We handed over newly printed AUDIT C forms to admitted patients in various wards of hospital and once returned to us we compared the alcohol consumption score with the score mentioned in old AUDIT-C forms which are part of A/E clerking forms. Setting:06 wards in Princess Alexandra Hospital, Harlow. Participants: 51 admitted patients. Main outcome measures To find the number of patients, positive for excessive alcohol consumption and how many of those were diagnosed and offered help during A/E clerking. Results: We screened fifty one patients admitted in 6 wards randomly, through this audit, 21/51 (41%) patients were AUDIT_C positive. Almost half of these positive cases were neither clerked for their alcohol history nor offered help for alcohol cut-down. These patients, although, were admitted with different diagnosis but still at high risk for alcohol related disorders e.g. Alcoholic liver disease etc. Conclusion We found that number of positive cases during this audit (41%), were significantly high when comparing to those in 2017(31%) and 2016(27%) audits. Despite such high rise in number of positive cases, the half of patients remained no clerked during A/E presentation. Data obtained from this audit were used to guide operational changes to improve the process of alcohol history recording in A/E pro forma.

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