Hospitals sending SMS Messaging to help reduce alcohol consumption

There is no doubt that the Christmas and the New Year period is a time when people tend to eat , drink and be merry...sometimes too much so.  Interestingly, some emergency wards in the US are trialling a new mobile campaign to collect information on patients’ drinking habits and help support their efforts to control their drinking.  The goal of the mobile campaign is to gather data and offer support to young patients that have been discharged from an emergency ward who are looking to control the amount of alcohol that they drink.

As is the case in many parts of the world, in the US it is all too common for young adults to binge drink (even when it’s not the holiday period).  Unfortunately many of these people end up in a hospital emergency ward, and around a third of them report that they are abusing alcohol and/or becoming dependent on it.  Now, all these trips to the hospital get expensive so the Emergency Medicine Foundation (a non-profit organisation dedicated to reducing driving under the influence and under-age drinking) was given a grant to research binge drinking by young adults.  It decided to use an automated text messaging program to gather information on these patients’ drinking habits and give support to those who need to reduce their drinking.

The research started by asking young participants that had been to hospital after over-imbibing to fill in an initial computer based survey about the amount of alcohol that they drank in a typical week.  Around half of the participants were found to be drinking dangerously high levels each week.  It then sent the participants automated SMS messages asking for weekly feedback on their drinking.  If their replies suggested that they were drinking too heavily they were sent a text message asking if they wanted to set a target to reduce their consumption.  If they replied yes they were then sent supportive text messages which included strategies for cutting down. Those who didn’t want to cut down on their drinking were sent a text message which encouraged them to rethink their decision.  During its three month trial using the SMS-based mobile campaign the Emergency Medicine Foundation found that using text messaging helped ex-emergency ward that had dangerous drinking habits to change their behaviour and reduce their alcohol consumption.

Certainly these results are similar to other SMS-base health campaigns, such as weight loss or giving up smoking, which found texting to be a highly effective way of supporting patients trying to alter their behaviour.  It can take a while for young adults to learn their limits when it comes to drinking, so anything that can help educate them and reduce binge drinking must be a good idea.