Prevention of alcohol-related accidents in the community.

This paper establishes a conceptual and operational basis for development of community prevention programs to reduce alcohol-related accidents. A public health perspective of accidents is proposed as the philosophical basis for local prevention interventions in which accidents are viewed as system problems (system outputs, if you will) not simply problems caused by a few alcohol-dependent individuals. Since there are no examples of controlled community prevention research projects (trials) which have demonstrated a reduction in community-level alcohol-related accidents, such controlled trials are needed in the future. An example of one being developed by the Prevention Research Center, Berkeley, CA is provided. Without such controlled trials, prevention research will be unable to demonstrate that such accidents can actually be reduced. This paper explores the applications of a public health perspective to the prevention of alcohol-involved accidents at the community level including a conceptual model of alcohol-involved trauma and suggested design, alternative local interventions, possible outcome measures, and phases for community prevention of alcohol-related accidents.