Sixty thousand new doctors will be specifically trained in the next ten years to identify and treat people who are drinking too much, Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo has announced. Medical schools have been allocated £650,000 to do a scoping exercise next financial year to see how alcohol misuse training can be added to the curriculum.
Alcohol misuse costs the NHS around £1.7 billion every year. For every £1 invested in specialist alcohol services for dependent drinkers, the public purse saves £5, including a £1.65 saving for the NHS.
