Student awareness of campus medical amnesty policies

Abstract

Objective

Examine students’ awareness of medical amnesty policies and the influence of policy awareness on the expected consequences of bystander help seeking in alcohol-related emergencies among student-athletes and non-athletes. Participants: 1,012 college students. Methods: Spearman’s correlation and chi-square tests were used to examine accuracy in awareness of amnesty policies. Nominal logistic regression was used to test the relationship between amnesty policy awareness and expected consequences of bystander help seeking. Results: About 25% of students were unsure if their school had an amnesty policy; of these students, 67% attended schools with such a policy. Students who were unsure about the presence of amnesty policies were more likely to expect serious negative consequences of calling for help for both non-athlete peers (B = 1.152 p < 0.001) and student-athlete peers (B = 0.887 p = 0.001). Conclusions: Greater attention is needed to how amnesty policies are implemented on college campuses, including how they are communicated to and interpreted by student-athletes.

Keywords:

• Alcohol
• amnesty
• college students
• school policies

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the McCrae Williams Foundation for their data collection efforts and dedication to raise awareness and encourage help seeking.

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States and received approval from the IRB of the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the McCrae Williams Foundation to examine and revise their survey to support a future project. This manuscript was a result of examining their pilot data while working on revisions for the survey tocontinue these efforts.