November newsletter – Alcohol Awareness Week

It’s Alcohol Awareness Week! For your November newsletter we will be focusing on how you can get involved in the week, as well as sharing your usual alcohol news round up.

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What is Alcohol Awareness Week?

Alcohol Awareness Week is a chance for people to get thinking about their drinking. It’s a week of awareness-raising, signposting for support and campaigning for change, through which charities, GP surgeries, pharmacies, local authorities and other community groups across the UK run events to help their area to drink more healthily.

Alcohol is a factor in the deaths of three people every hour in the UK. Last year 1.2 million people in the UK were admitted to hospital because of alcohol, and it costs the NHS £3.5 billion each year in England alone. Over 200,000 children in England live with an alcohol-dependent parent or carer, and they are twice as likely as other children to experience difficulties at school, five times more likely to develop eating disorders and three times more likely to consider suicide. Even for adults, having an alcohol-dependent loved one increases your chance of suffering from a wide range of harms ranging from mental health problems to financial problems and interpersonal violence.

Find out more

Interactive resources

Body map

Explore this interactive body map to learn more about the impact of alcohol on your body and how cutting down can improve your health.

Explore the map

Alcohol quiz

How many units are in a pint of beer or glass of wine? How long does it take your body to break down booze? This Alcohol Awareness Week, test your knowledge around alcohol with this quick quiz.

Tony Adams: “If you won’t get help for you, get help for the people you love.”

A new survey, commissioned for Alcohol Awareness Week, shows that people are negatively affected by others’ drinking, but believe that their own drinking does not negatively affect others.

Commenting on the survey Tony Adams, ex-Arsenal and England football captain, founder of addiction charity Sporting Chance and patron of Nacoa, said:

“Alcohol took me down and almost destroyed my life. The thing that made a difference was asking for help. Now I’ve been sober for 23 years, and it’s not just my life that’s better, it’s the lives of everyone around me – my friends, my family, most of all my children.

“If you’re drinking too much it’s easy to think that it doesn’t matter because it’s only affecting you. Lots of us don’t care much about ourselves, and we push our own needs aside. But if you’re drinking heavily it will be affecting people around you, even if you don’t realise it. So if you won’t get help for you – and I hope you will – get help for the people you love.

“Charities like Alcohol Change UK and Nacoa aren’t just about helping people who drink. They’re about helping whole families, whole communities, that are affected by alcohol. If you’re being affected by someone else’s drinking, reach out to charities like theirs, because you deserve support too.”

Read the press release

Get free resources

It’s not too late to get involved in Alcohol Awareness Week! Sign up now to receive free resources including printable posters, factsheets, social media images and more.

Stories of change

Read the Alcohol Awareness Week blog, with stories from people whose lives have been affected by alcohol harm, as well as organisations working to make a difference.

Check out the blog

Learn about alcohol

Read factsheets on all things alcohol, from mental health to your liver to parenting.

Read the factsheets

Alcohol news

More than a third of children negatively affected by their parents’ drinking

The study, published in the journal of Alcohol and Alcoholism, found a significant link between the amount of alcohol consumed by parents and the increased negative experiences among children who witness them in a drunk or tipsy state. The negative experiences listed by the children surveyed include having arguments with their parents more frequently and being given less attention than usual.

Smokers who also drink alcohol are 30 times more likely to develop mouth or throat cancer

This is compared to those who either smoke or drink. The Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems published a guide for medics, called ‘Alcohol and Cancer Risks: A Guide for Health Professionals’. It draws attention to the link between alcohol consumption and cancer, and offers advice on how the risks can be reduced.

Minimum unit pricing to come into force in Wales in March 2020

A minimum price of 50p per unit is to be charged, which will see the cost of alcoholic drinks with a higher percentage ABV rise in hope to reduce the public’s consumption. A similar system was implemented in Scotland last year, which has so far had a positive effect on reducing drinking.

How public health cuts have affected England’s poorest communities

Cuts to public health services have affected the most deprived areas in England the most, according to this piece, published on the Institute of Public Policy and Research website. Data from 2014 to 2019 is used to show the total cuts that different services have experienced, and how that has affected different communities. The drug and alcohol services sector has lost £260.9 million pounds over that five-year period.

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