Alcohol stats that don't add up

Alcohol Concern (AC) is our national alcohol charity. It’s not anti-alcohol, it says, just against the harm alcohol causes. It is proud of the fact that its campaigns are “evidence-based”.

In this article I want to examine the truth of these claims. AC has just published an ‘alcohol harm map’ which details the costs of alcohol harm in England and Wales. The headline conclusion is that there are nearly 10 million alcohol-related hospital visits or admissions a year.

So how was this huge figure arrived at? Alcohol Concern has been working with a member of the pharmaceutical industry to produce its regional map. Estimates of inpatient admissions, A&E and outpatient attendances are all combined.

The alcohol-related outpatient estimates are themselves based on ‘benchmarks’ from the Birmingham Heavy Drinkers Project conducted between 1997 and 2004. It also makes use of the General Lifestyle Survey for 2009, along with the number of high-risk drinkers taken from Local Alcohol Profiles Estimates for 2005.

There are major problems with the methods used to assess numbers here. For example, there is no central, official record of A&E data in relation to alcohol, so AC relies on a 2003 survey conducted by MORI which estimates that 35% of A&E attendances are alcohol-related.

AC then applied this percentage to the 18.3 million A&E attendances to arrive at a total of 6.3 million alcohol-related attendances in 2012/13.

This survey was aimed at A&E nurses who were asked questions like: “What percentage of your admissions would you say involve alcohol in some way?”

So nearly two thirds of the 10 million figure is based on the subjective opinions of nurses gathered in a survey that is 11 years old and when alcohol consumption was 20% higher than it is now!

This is a study that cobbles together estimates, surveys and opinions, calculated to inflate alcohol harm and alarm public opinion, and passes them off as fact.

In fact the Office for National Statistics has detailed hospital admission data for exactly the same geographical areas that Alcohol Concern guess-timates. And there are huge differences between AC’s numbers and the official figures.

Two examples: AC states there were 48,745 alcohol-related hospital admissions in Westminster in 2012/13. According to the ONS, the number is 3,360. In Barnsley AC says there were 46,992 admissions; the ONS records only 900.

The discrepancies are massive in each and every area and AC doesn’t explain why their numbers are between 10 and 50 times higher than the official statistics. He who pays the piper calls the tune: Alcohol Concern has lost £527,143 since 2011.

So how have they kept going?

Well they’ve sold their offices, but in addition they have sought donations from the pharmaceutical industry. Up to the end of 2013 they had received £68,500 from pharmaceutical company Lundbeck Limited, and £10,000 from pharmaceutical giant Merck Serono to fund their annual conference.

It is Lundbeck that paid for the alcohol harm map — £3,000. AC’s latest accounts for the year ended 31 March 2014, show that they had just £153,583 cash reserves at the end of the financial year.

Now, Lundbeck markets a pill called Selincro that can be taken to dampen down that desire for an extra glass of wine! It’s a treatment that GPs are now expected to prescribe to “mild alcoholics” at a cost to the NHS of £280m a year.

Clearly it makes sense for Lundbeck to recruit agents of influence from the health lobby to help them push their pill, and AC’s finances make them an easy target. Chief executive Jackie Ballard described Selincro as a “useful addition to the clinician’s toolbox”. AC also cites the importance of tackling middle class, middle aged drinking — the target patient group for Selincro.

In its 2013 report, AC declares that it is a “counterweight to (the alcohol industry’s) vested interests”, but that it wants to make sure that policy towards alcohol is “informed by solid evidence”. Whose evidence would that be I wonder?

Paul Chase is a director of CPL Training and a leading industry commentator on alcohol policy and health ​