• Alcohol. Clin. Exp. Res. · Sep 2012

    Variation in documented care for unhealthy alcohol consumption across race/ethnicity in the Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System.

    • 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.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…