This scientific poster describes a study aimed at determining the effect of two types of Brief Intervention (BI) strategies on: (1) subject's post-injury alcohol consumption; and (2) on alcohol-related driving events after hospitalization for an alcohol-related motor vehicle crash. BI can take the form of Simple Advice (SA) or Brief Counselling (BC). A study with a three group, experimental design (SA and BC) and one control group (CG) with a total of 135 subjects is currently in progress. After 20 months of a three year study, the investigators have enrolled 88 subjects (66 men and 22 women) aged 19 to 45 years with a mean injury severity score of 10.41. Although sample size at 6 months and 1 year remain small at this point in data collection, SA and BI groups do not show clear differences from the control group in drinks per drinking days and days of abstinence. Other preliminary findings include a subject attrition rate of 27% (24 of 88 subjects). Circa 80% of the crash reports and driving records requested have been received. Unexpected difficulties retrieving driver abstracts and crash reports include the number of subjects who were driving without a license at the time of injury or the inability of subjects to provide accurate information about social security number, state of issue or license number.
Abstract