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Norcas - Safer Drinking Training for Companies

Project: Safer Drinking Training for Companies

Region: Norfolk

Amount approved: £25,000

Originally the Norfolk Alcohol Service, Norcas has steadily expanded into neighbouring counties and now has the ability to help people of all ages, with both alcohol and drug problems. The service critical to this grant is their workplace drug and alcohol awareness which has been taken up frequently by various public sector bodies, such as emergency services, and a number of corporate clients. The value of such work has continued to grow, particularly among the area’s increasing range of bodies with mobile workforces which spend a lot of their time on the road.

This grant enables Norcas to increase the reach of these workplace alcohol awareness sessions by making them available free of charge. They offer two types: one for senior management teams who, while learning about the substance and its effects themselves, are also shown how to embed the knowledge into company policies. The larger sessions are more conventional awareness raising workshops for entire workforces which have much simpler, directly educational purposes. An advantage of offering free sessions is that those clients which previously only paid for the smaller, senior management workshops, suddenly have a considerable incentive to educate all their staff.

Although these sessions are necessarily bespoke given the wide variety of interested agencies, Norcas have a firm grasp of why key messages must remain consistent. Units of alcohol in most popular drinks are always covered, as are ways to guarantee sobriety when an individual gets behind the wheel or sets about operating machinery at work.

Most encouragingly of all from the Drinkaware perspective, Norcas also has a timetable for gathering feedback from all workshop beneficiaries. They find that a three-month gap is sufficient to revisit each client and discover how well the information has been remembered. Besides this, Norcas only consistently covers alcohol education with its school based activity, causing this project to represent an excellent match with the grants guidelines in that it supports work which is over and above their ongoing core outputs, while also being based on previous experience. If we can also collaborate to ensure elements of this model are used elsewhere, the impact of this grant and project will be undeniable.

In the future, Norcas hope that alcohol will become as important to employers as health and safety or absenteeism, with regard to both their policies and training priorities. Should such recognition of its significance come about, they would also hope that demand for these sessions would increase, causing the Drinkaware contribution to prompt to wider replication of this work from alternative funding sources. At the same time, Drinkaware hopes this initiative will yield useful information on face to face alcohol education for adults, which is a much neglected field.

Page last updated by: Unknown, 10 May 2012.

Page checked on: 20 Jun 2011