Are you drinking too much?
Excessive alcohol consumption has long been recognised as a concern amongst health professionals, both in terms of the risk of health concerns for the practitioner and also their ability to provide quality health care to their patients. Research has identified a range of factors associated with hazardous levels of alcohol consumption in health practitioners such as stress and anxiety levels and having experienced a medicolegal matter. Indeed, coping with stress is one of the reasons many people turn to alcohol.
Excessive drinking can lead to various health issues, such as liver damage and heart problems. Addiction or alcohol use disorder is a significant public health concern in Australia. There is significant comorbidity between alcohol use disorders and other mental health disorders, with nearly half of females and one third of males with an alcohol use disorder meeting the criteria for an anxiety disorder, affective disorder or drug-use disorder. Alcohol and illicit substances are responsible for 7% of the national disease burden in Australia.
Hazardous and harmful alcohol or drug use may be related to extrinsic factors, such as job-related stress, long hours of work, time pressures, patient demands and concerns about patient complaints or litigation, and intrinsic factors such as personality, obsessive traits, perfectionism or the internal expectation to be able to cope. While there is little published research on alcohol dependence, what evidence there is suggests that alcohol impairment is a risk factor for medical error or adverse patient outcomes.
National guidelines from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council Guidelines suggest that healthy adults should drink:
no more than 10 standard drinks a week
no more than 4 standard drinks in any 1 day
If you are concerned about your drinking, you should seek support from your doctor. You can use the AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test) screening tool to assess your alcohol consumption. The AUDIT tool is an effective and reliable screening tool for detecting risky and harmful drinking patterns.
National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline
This hotline provides confidential support for people struggling with addiction. You can call the Alcohol Drug Information Service (ADIS) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on 1800 250 015.