• Emily C Williams, Gwen T Lapham, Eric J Hawkins, Anna D Rubinsky, Leo S Morales, Bessie A Young, and Katharine A Bradley.
• Health Services Research & Development, Seattle, Washington 98101, USA. emily.williams3@va.gov
• Alcohol. Clin. Exp. Res. 2012 Sep 1; 36 (9): 1614-22.

BackgroundThe VA Healthcare System has made progress implementing evidence-based care for unhealthy alcohol use, but whether there are differences in care across race/ethnicity is unclear. We describe alcohol-related care for 3 racial/ethnic groups among VA outpatients with unhealthy alcohol use.MethodsThis cross-sectional study utilized secondary quality improvement data collected for the VA Office of Quality and Performance (July 2006 to June 2007) to identify a sample of 9,194 black (n = 1,436), Hispanic (n = 500), and white (n = 7,258) VA outpatients who screened positive for unhealthy alcohol use (AUDIT-C score ≥4 men; ≥3 women). Alcohol-related care was defined as medical record documentation of brief intervention (advice or feedback) and/or referral (discussion of or scheduled). Logistic regression models estimated the prevalence of alcohol-related care among black, Hispanic, and white patients after adjustment for sociodemographic characteristics, alcohol use severity, other substance use, and mental health comorbidity.ResultsAmong all eligible patients, 2,903 (32%) had documented alcohol-related care. Adjusted prevalences were 35.3% (95% CI 30.0 to 40.5) for black, 27.3% (95% CI 21.1 to 33.5) for Hispanic, and 28.9% (95% CI 25.5 to 32.3) for white patients. Differences in documented alcohol-related care between all racial/ethnic groups were significant (p-values all < 0.05).ConclusionsAmong VA patients with unhealthy alcohol use, black patients had the highest, and Hispanic the lowest, prevalence of documented alcohol-related care. Future research should evaluate contextual and system-, provider-, or patient-level factors that may attenuate racial/ethnic differences in documented alcohol-related care, as well as whether differences in documented care are associated with differences in outcomes.Copyright © 2012 by the Research Society on Alcoholism.

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