Brief Approaches to Alcohol Screening: Practical Alternatives for Primary Care

Excerpt

Brief alcohol counseling is one of the most important preventive services we can offer primary care patients. As many as 20% of general medicine outpatients have unhealthy drinking patterns (definitions1‐5 in box) and can benefit from brief counseling interventions.6 The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends routine alcohol screening followed by brief interventions (BI),7 and in 2006, the National Commission on Prevention Priorities (NCPP) ranked alcohol screening and BI in the top five U.S. prevention priorities.8 NCPP is funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to prioritize USPSTF recommendations based on the clinically preventable burden of disease and cost effectiveness, and alcohol screening and brief counseling was one of the few preventive interventions that NCPP found to be cost saving.8 However, the NCPP also noted that alcohol screening and counseling were among the least implemented recommended interventions studied, and efforts to implement alcohol screening and BI outside research settings have made slow progress. …