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 By Ankur Banerjee
(Reuters Health) - Amnesty policies may encourage college students
to call for help with alcohol-related issues before they or their
intoxicated peers become seriously ill, a U.S. study suggests.
After a medical amnesty policy was implemented at Georgetown
University in Washington, DC, the average daily number of
alcohol-related calls to the school's emergency medical services
(EMS) agency went up, but calls requiring advanced life support
services fell by nearly 60 percent.
Georgetown implemented its medical amnesty policy in August 2014,
protecting students seeking medical treatment for alcohol-related
emergencies from disciplinary process.
Many universities have adopted such policies to encourage students
and bystanders to seek emergency care by reducing sanctions, as
dangerous alcohol-related situations are often underreported due to
fears over disciplinary actions, researchers write in the Journal of
Adolescent Health.
The results at Georgetown suggest the policy empowers intoxicated
students, or bystanders, to call for medical assistance before a
crisis develops, they add.
"We were surprised about the decrease in patients who required or
met criteria for advanced level life support care for alcohol
related emergencies after implementation of the amnesty policy,"
Brian Monahan, the study's lead author and a medical student at
Georgetown, told Reuters Health by email.
Monahan and colleagues reviewed records of the university's EMS
agency for three years before and three years after the amnesty
policy went into effect in August 2014.
The average daily number of calls for intoxication in the fall
semesters rose from 0.84 before the amnesty policy to 0.93
afterward. In the spring, however, these calls fell only slightly,
to 0.41 calls per day from 0.42 per day.
The proportion of emergencies requiring advanced life support
services dropped from 9 percent to 3.7 percent after the amnesty
policy was put in place.
In addition, calls for alcohol-related emergencies were made earlier
in the evening, suggesting students were seeking help when the level
of intoxication was less severe.
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The amnesty program was also used by administrators "to identify
at-risk students and engage them in behavioral therapy, which has
been shown to decrease risky drinking behaviors," the authors write.
"Since this was a retrospective study, we cannot say anything about
causality, however, we believe the data support that individuals at
Georgetown were utilizing the amnesty policy to call emergency
medical services earlier and for less severe intoxication," Monahan
said.
Other limitations of the study include a lack of control for
potential changes in alcohol consumption trends in the population,
the authors note. Also, they only looked at calls where intoxication
was the chief complaint, whereas other emergencies where alcohol may
have been a factor were not included. Finally, they point out,
students at the university have a variety of health insurance plans
and have the option of calling other emergency medical services.
In a separate recent study involving 1,200 first-year students at
Palo Alto University in California, researchers found that
implementing a medical amnesty policy did not increase drinking,
overall alcohol consumption, or medical consequences.(http://bit.ly/2RgyddQ)
In that August report, published in the Journal of Studies on
Alcohol and Drugs, Amie Hass and colleagues wrote that their
findings "suggest that policies designed to remove barriers to
college students seeking help for alcohol overdose do not increase
overall alcohol involvement or the incidence of alcohol-related
problems resulting from heavy consumption."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2Ra63AU Journal of Adolescent Health, online
October 4, 2018.
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