Task sharing and teamwork: clinician preferences for alcohol screening and brief interventions in cardiology

A total of 664 cardiology clinicians responded to a cross-sectional survey (30.9% response rate), including 55.1% nurses, 21.4% assistant nurses, 18.8% doctors, and 4.7% other clinical staff. Among these participants, 87.5% indicated that patients should be screened for alcohol use on cardiology wards, 79.8% in outpatient clinics, 49.1% in emergency departments, and 45.9% on coronary care units. Doctors and nurses were the preferred professions to be responsible for screening across all clinical contexts, while fewer respondents indicated that assistant nurses or physiotherapists should be responsible for screening (p < .001). Most participants (85.2%) indicated that patients should be screened in more than one clinical context and 84.6% indicated that more than one profession should be responsible for alcohol screening. Clinicians' preferred modality for assessing alcohol use was verbal screening (92% of participants), followed by questionnaires (53.5%), digital tools (28.5%), and alcohol biomarkers (22.1%, p < .001). Just over half of participants (58%) indicated that they would like to attend training on brief interventions. Findings suggest that task sharing, teamwork, and training may be effective strategies for implementation of alcohol screening and brief interventions in clinical cardiology.