Alcohol misuse costs NHS £2.7bn annually, study says

Misuse of alcohol – and ill health caused by this – costs the NHS £2.7 billion each year, according to new statistics from the National Audit Office (NAO).

Describing it as an “increasing burden”, the NAO also found that local efforts to address alcohol misuse are not well-planned and hospital admissions for the three conditions most commonly related to alcohol have doubled in the last 11 years.

The NAO discovered that about a quarter of all primary care trusts (PCTs) have not completely assessed their area’s alcohol problems and while many look to their drug and alcohol action teams for leadership, these tend to address their primary focus on illegal drugs.

“Primary care trusts need to understand better the scale of the problem in their local communities,” said NAO head Tim Burr.

“The Department of Health could, for example, do more to convince trusts about the value of timely advice to help people develop safer drinking patterns.”

As of September 2008, the department has given more money towards preventative services to reduce alcohol consumption, including brief advice from health workers and GPs.

There has also been a new publicity campaign centred on responsible drinking after research found consumers tended to underestimate how many units of alcohol were in one drink and what a unit actually was. For example a 175 ml glass of 13 per cent-strength wine has 2.3 units, each of which is defined as ten ml of ethanol.

A recent report published by the NAO also focused on the UK’s health sector, finding that one in seven users of the NHS and social care system in the past five years was dissatisfied with their experience.