Alcohol prevention
Preventing Alcohol-Related Harm in Europe
Work Package 6 supports EU initiatives, including Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, by addressing alcohol consumption and related harm, also among youth and populations in vulnerable situations. It assesses young people’s exposure to alcohol marketing and access to alcohol, particularly online, and identifies ways to protect young people from exposure to alcohol marketing practices and regulations to reduce youth drinking. The work also pilots innovative youth prevention approaches, such as community-based initiatives, and examines challenges linked to e-commerce and home delivery of alcohol. In addition, WP6 strengthens capacity building by identifying good practices for communicating lower-risk alcohol use and rolling out tailored brief interventions with new agents in diverse settings serving vulnerable groups.
The mission is to reduce alcohol-related harm in Europe by generating evidence on youth exposure to marketing, developing recommendations on approaches to national lower-risk drinking guidelines, and scaling up brief intervention capacity for vulnerable populations in new settings.
Objectives
- To assess and mitigate youth exposure to online alcohol marketing and access to alcohol.
- To map possible solutions and good examples from different countries to develop innovative approaches to reduce alcohol harm among young people.
- To identify good examples and innovative approaches for managing e-commerce and home delivery.
- To identify good and innovative practices in communicating information on lower-risk alcohol use.
- To identify, scale up, and enhance best and promising practices (including early identification and brief intervention) to reduce alcohol-related harm.
- To pilot and scale up tailored brief intervention practices in different settings serving selected groups in vulnerable situations.
Actions
Planned activities
- To perform a mapping and assessment of alcohol marketing among youth: This involves conducting a rapid literature review and a survey focused on youth exposure to online alcohol marketing and reviewing relevant regulatory and enforcement practices.
- To identify and pilot innovative approaches and good examples related to reducing alcohol use and related harm in young people: This involves surveying how adolescents acquire alcohol, collecting proven community-based prevention practices, piloting selected practices, and disseminating the resultant descriptions.
- To identify good and innovative practices in communicating information on lower-risk alcohol use to the general population, as well as vulnerable groups: This task identifies key elements of effective messaging beyond gram limits and subsequently tests these elements for understanding in various target groups via focus groups.
- To promote brief intervention practices to reduce alcohol consumption: This task involves conducting a rapid review of existing good practices for brief interventions (BI) in less established settings, developing adaptable intervention materials for agents serving populations in situations of vulnerability, and running proof-of-concept pilots for these settings.
Expected outcomes
- Tangible policy impact, with at least 10 policymakers or national stakeholders citing findings from the youth exposure mapping in official communications
- Three pilot projects on youth alcohol prevention implemented across EU Member States
- Recommendations on lower-risk alcohol consumption, including a new review of existing guidelines
- Key deliverables, including:
- an article draft on exposure to online marketing
- a summary of the results concerning Prevention of Alcohol-Related Harm in Europe (WP6)
- Capacity building outcomes: an expected 30% average increase in delivery rates for behavioural brief interventions among professionals at pilot sites