Objective
Mitigate the impact of alcohol misuse on the consuming public and high risk cultures by teaching valuable skills and providing practical tools that promote moderation and consumption management.
Rationale
Alcohol misuse manifests itself in the occurrence of intentional and unintentional injury and contributes to the ever growing burden of healthcare costs incurred by society. Not all of these injuries are the consequence of addiction and, in fact, failure to recognize that alcohol misuse spans a continuum from social drinking to alcoholism leaves stakeholders bearing these costs.
Background
Alcohol misuse accounts for $14.6 billion in annual costs in Canada (CCSA, 2006) and is a known contributing factor in 60 medical conditions (CAMH, 2006). In spite of these costs, most alcohol awareness programs address alcohol-related issues through programs that demand abstinence. For the vast majority of drinkers, however, abstinence is neither desirable nor needed.
Public and private sector stakeholders are in a unique position to mitigate some of the factors related to alcohol misuse by empowering their constituents to manage their consumption and teaching them the skills to do so. By providing this learning preemptively, stakeholders can promote health, reduce harms, minimize costs and curtail alcohol misuse from becoming alcohol addiction.
Method/Approach
BAC Discrimination Training is a well researched and documented method for increasing social drinkers' appreciation of the harms associated with alcohol consumption and remains the only way to improve the ability of drinkers to better estimate their level of intoxication and understand alcohol’s impairing effects.
Know Your AQ (Alcohol Quotient) is an experiential, action-based health and wellness program that teaches individuals moderation through BAC Discrimination Training, providing real-life skills to manage alcohol consumption in realistic settings. Through a combination of repeated breath testing, cognitive testing and psychomotor testing over a 5 hour period, individuals learn to correlate their personal physical symptoms with specific levels of blood alcohol concentration.
Key Findings
Know Your AQ training enables individuals to recognize impairment; identify personal triggers for drinking; understand personal limits and challenge attitudes about drinking.
Providing early access to such training can lower the occurrence of injury and the associated costs of medical claims, workforce absenteeism, utilization of health benefits, employee turnover, poor workplace productivity and empower individuals to adopt a healthy relationship with alcohol.
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