Citation

Kypri K. Addiction 2015; 110(6): 965-966.

Affiliation

School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/add.12935

PMID

25963871

Abstract

In their evaluation of a 1-hour increase in opening hours of alcohol outlets (from 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, and from 3 a.m. to 4 a.m. on weeknights) in central Amsterdam, de Goeij and colleagues find a 34% increase in ambulance attendances for alcohol-related injury compared with other areas within the city.

This is the first evaluation of such a law change to utilize ambulance data, where previous studies relied on police or hospital data. A significant limitation of police data is the confounding of deterrence and detection. How many police are on the beat and how they respond to crime can vary temporally and spatially in ways that bias inferences about the effects of law changes. Hospital admissions or emergency department data are afflicted by a different set of service delivery variables, e.g. policies on what constitutes an admission or episode of care. Such data sets typically lack systematically collected information on patient alcohol impairment or even the time or location of the injury, let alone details of the event that caused injury....


Keywords:
Alcohol;assault;bars;closing time;disorder;licensed premises;lockout;pubs;trading hours;violence

Language: en