Alcohol IBA e-Learning course

e-learning background

The Alcohol Identification and Brief Advice e-learning project (Alcohol IBA) helps professionals with identifying those individuals whose drinking might be impacting on their health and delivering simple, structured advice. It has been developed in partnership with the Department of Health's Alcohol Policy Team and e-Learning for Healthcare .

We have developed three e-learning courses to date. You are encouraged to visit the e-learning course that is most appropriate to your profession.

The Alcohol programme on the e-LfH Learning Management System supports:

• IBA in Primary Care
• IBA in Community Pharmacy
• IBA in Hospital Settings

These courses have been designed to provide the skills and understanding to deliver IBA in line with the National Occupational Standard AH10 - 'employ techniques to help individuals adopt sensible drinking behaviour'.

Each course teaches users how to use World Health Organisation validated tools to identify patients' levels of health risk from alcohol and how to intervene appropriately with those who could benefit from cutting down. The curriculum is based on the robust evidence-base of 56 controlled trials over 30 years which show that five minutes of structured, motivational advice is effective in reducing health risks from alcohol in 1 in 8 recipients.

Alcohol IBA supports the Department of Health's desire to reduce the wide range of health harms to which alcohol misuse contributes.

Each course offers five e-learning sessions, each taking around 20 minutes to complete followed by a sixth session,an assessment of your learning. A record of achievement can be printed out once the final assessment session has been undertaken.

The Alcohol programme is available to anyone with a NHS e-mail address.

You will be able to bookmark your place in the course. The system will also keep a record of the learning you have undertaken and you will be able to print a record of achievement after the final assessment.

• Alcohol IBA - 01
  An introduction session which will help learners to understand alcohol units in common alcoholic beverages, employ the different terms used to describe drinking and its risks appropriately and identify the physical, mental, social and legal implications of excessive drinking.
• Alcohol IBA - 02
  This session explains the scale of alcohol-related harm in the adult population and provides evidence of how Alcohol IBA can reduce the scale of this harm. The aims and key principles of Alcohol IBA are also described.
• Alcohol IBA - 03
  This session describes the different AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test) based tools available for identifying alcohol misuse, and provides guidelines on how these can best be introduced and interpreted.
• Alcohol IBA - 04
  This session examines the relationship between the practitioner and the individual undergoing brief advice and provides some practical guidelines to use during brief advice.
• Alcohol IBA - 05
  This session provides video examples of brief advice in practice, and how a practitioner responds to the patient. It demonstrates how the elements of FRAMES are applied and how the AUDIT questionnaire and structured advice tool are used to facilitate brief advice.
• Alcohol IBA - 06
  An assessment to test the knowledge gained following completion of the five previous sessions.