Identification and Brief Advice

Several tools are available for Identification and Brief advice including a variety of training tools. At present the Department of Health cannot provide definitive guidance on which tools to use as this depends on alcohol harm reduction intervention activity at a local level.

The SIPS controlled trials are also presently underway to test IBA in a variety of settings and you can access some of the preliminary findings given at the INEBRIA conference in Oct 2009 here.

The tools below are supported by the DH policy guidance in Safe sensible social.

• IBA Commissioning Training Guidance and Tools
• Access the free IBA e-Learning Course
• Access and download the IBA Training Role Play Videos
• Discussion Forums

Identification Tools

The following tools have been revised and updated as of December 2008 by the DH and SIPS:

• AUDIT - Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test
  The full Audit, providing 10 alcohol identification questions, is the gold standard of identification tests and was developed by WHO. Other shorter versions of Audit are also provided below.
• AUDIT - PC
  The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test Primary Care (AUDIT-PC) provides an adapted Primary Care version of the full AUDIT with questions 1, 2, 4, 5 and 10 of the AUDIT asked first. (2008, DH)
• AUDIT - Guidelines for use in Primary Care
  This manual introduces the AUDIT, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, and describes how to use it to identify persons with hazardous and harmful patterns of alcohol consumption. The AUDIT...
• AUDIT - C
  A revised Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test Consumption (AUDIT C ) which places questions 1, 2 and 3 of the AUDIT first with the remaining 7 AUDIT questions after. (2008, DH)
• FAST
  Fast Alcohol Screening Test (FAST) contains 3 additional questions to the SASQ. This version also covers the remaining six questions from the audit.
• M-SASQ
  The Modified Single Alcohol Screening Question (M-SASQ) tool provides one question for identification purposes. M-SASQ was modified from the original SASQ (Cananasaby and Vinson, 2005) by SIPS .

Structured Brief Advice Tool

This structured tool for giving brief advice is based on the 'How Much is too Much' patient leaflet originally produced by Newcastle University and the WHO collaboration. (DH, Revised Mar 2009).

• Brief Advice Tool 2009

Other IBA Tools

• SIPS Identification and Brief Advice Toolkit
• PAT (2009)

Identification and Brief Advice (IBA) Training and Tools

View the IBA training commissioning guidance, IBA Training the trainers workbook and more..