Effectiveness of health education and brief intervention in reducing risk of alcohol drinking among ethnic groups in Kota Kinabalu

• Main Author: Wenda Riona Lamiri
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English; English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: R131-687 History of medicine. Medical expeditions
• Online Access: https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/40788/1/ABSTRACT.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/40788/2/FULLTEXT.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/40788/
• Institution: Universiti Malaysia Sabah

Sabah ranked second highest in alcohol consumption in Malaysia with 18.8%, after Sarawak 31.1% and Kuala Lumpur at third place with 18.4% while prevalence of current drinker in Malaysia was 11.1% as reported by NHMS 2019. The general objective of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of health education and brief intervention in reducing risk of alcohol drinking in Kota Kinabalu (KK) while the specific objective is to determine the proportions of different types of alcohol drinkers in KK, and to determine the effectiveness of intervention in reducing risk of alcohol drinking after three months between intervention and control groups. A quasi-experimental study was done in KK where data were collected from seven areas, selected using convenient sampling. There were two groups of participants – intervention and control group. Screening was done using self-report or assisted questionnaire, Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT), which was validated in Malay version by Universiti Malaya. AUDIT score was calculated and participants were categorized into zones according to score obtained. Health education and brief intervention (in reference to published guideline by MOH) was given according to zones, scoring then repeated after three months. Comparison between two groups were then made after three months to see the effectiveness of mentioned intervention. The age range of the participants in this study was from 13 to 85 years old with 406 males and 360 females with a total of 766 participants – 473 are in the intervention group while 293 are in the control group. Among them, 9.9% are adolescent, 45.8% young adulthood, 37.3% middle adulthood and 6.9% in late adulthood. The types of drinkers observed based on their consumption was 55.3% low risk, 33.6% medium risk, 6.4% high risk and 4.4% dependent drinkers. Chi square test was initially done to see whether both groups were comparable or not which has shown both groups to be similar in age and genders but different in ethnic groups. The mean of AUDIT score change was greater in intervention group (M=-1.34, SD=3.0) compared to control group (M=–0.22, SD=3.46) and it is statistically significant with p<0.05 (CI 95%). The difference in demography as mentioned above is adjusted by using linear regression which has shown that intervention is still effective even after adjusted to demography with p-value <0.05.Health education and brief intervention is effective in reducing risk of alcohol drinking in KK. This study conducted in KK suggests that screening coupled with brief intervention is effective in reducing risky drinking and thus should be practices not only in healthcare facilities but also in community level.