Harmonising alcohol consumption, sales and related outcomes data across the UK and Ireland: an insurmountable barrier to policy evaluation?

Abstract

There is a need to ensure public health policies are robustly evaluated to establish their benefits and harms on the population and subgroups. We aimed to assess the comparability of Northern Ireland (NI) and Republic of Ireland (RoI) alcohol-related data to determine their suitability for evaluating the effectiveness of alcohol policies on alcohol consumption, sales, and related outcomes. A comparability analysis of NI and RoI alcohol-related hospital admissions, deaths, consumption, sales, and crime administrative and survey data was undertaken. Data sources were compared, where applicable, in terms of coding systems, population coverage, definitions, quality, response/completion rates, and question similarity. The NI and RoI consumption and sales data were found not to be comparable enough for use in a natural experiment study; comparability for hospital admission data was acceptable. Key barriers to comparability included variations in population coverage and lack of overlap in questionnaire topics. Data access issues made it difficult to fully determine data comparability for alcohol-related crime and deaths. By contrast, NI alcohol-related data were more comparable with other UK countries, making comparisons for the purpose of policy evaluation possible. RoI would benefit from identifying another economically and culturally similar country with comparable alcohol-related data.

Keywords:

• Alcohol
• policy
• harmonisation
• deaths
• hospital admissions

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the help provided by the staff of the Honest Broker Service (HBS) within the Business Services Organisation Northern Ireland (BSO). The HBS is funded by the BSO and the Department of Health for Northern Ireland (DoH). We would also like to thank NISRA for supplying us with NI deaths data (with the permission of the Registrar general for Northern Ireland), and PSNI for providing aggregated crime data for NI. We greatly appreciate the advice provided by HPO and wish to thank them for supplying us with hospital admissions data from HIPE for RoI. We wish to thank DoH NI for supplying us with extracts from the NI Health Survey and the Adult Drinking Patterns Survey. The authors greatly appreciate the advice provided by Mark Robinson from Health Scotland and Lesley Graham from NHS National Services Scotland regarding measurement of alcohol-related data in Scotland, and Health Research Board for advice on RoI alcohol-related data. The authors alone are responsible for the interpretation of the data and any views or opinions presented are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the organisations acknowledged in this section.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by an Enabling Research Award from HSC R & D Division. MMcC holds a Medical Research Council/University fellowship supported by MRC partnership grant [MC/PC/13 027]. MMcC is part of SPHSU's Complexity in Health Improvement Programme, funded by the Medical Research Council [MC_UU_12017/14] and Chief Scientist Office [SPHSU14]. SVK is funded by a NRS Senior Clinical Fellowship [SCAF/15/02] and is part of SPHU's Informing Healthy Public Policy and Measurement and Analysis of Socioeconomic Inequalities in Health Programmes [MRC: MC_UU_12017/13 & MC_UU_12017/15 / CSO: SPHSU13 & SPHSU15].