National survey of alcohol treatment agencies in England: Characteristics of clients

Abstract

Background: To map and contact all alcohol treatment services in England offering Tier 2, 3 and 4 interventions and describe the characteristics of their service-users.Methods: A national cross-sectional survey of alcohol treatment providers in England, designed to gather information about the characteristics of clients referred, assessed, and treated in the financial 2003/4.Results: A total of 696 alcohol treatment agencies were mapped, of which 388 (55.7 %) responded to the survey. The majority of clients were men, particularly within residential and non-statutory agencies. A higher proportion of residential clients were highly alcohol dependent, homeless and neurologically impaired, whereas, community clients were more likely to be offenders or to have mental health problems. Non-statutory services were more likely to see homeless clients, offenders, and clients with mental health problems and neurological deficits than statutory services who, typically, see a more dependent population.Conclusions: Findings support the need for more specialist service provision for severely dependent offenders and dependent drinkers with serious mental illness. To aid future mapping of alcohol services, which allows areas of need to be identified, it is recommended that services have a monitoring system similar to that for drug misuse with the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System.