About the Safer Drinking team

First launched as “preview prevention” back in the late 1990’s, the prevention arm of alcohol services for the community (asc) has been going strong for over decade.

The aim of the Safer Drinking team is to reduce the harm associated with alcohol and other drug use by raising knowledge and awareness of alcohol and drinking throughout Luton. We do this by:

Training - As well as providing extensive, specialist, customised training for professionals from all disciplines (health, community safety, young people, vulnerable adults), we also have an annual training programme especially designed to appeal to smaller organisations who may only require training for one or two individuals, rather than a whole team.
Click here for our 2011/12 Training Programme and for further information about our customised training.

Community activity - The Safer Drinking team are happy to provide alcohol awareness stands for community events. At these stands we distribute specialist alcohol leaflets (the majority of which contain local contact information) and resources and engage the public in fun and interactive games to boost their knowledge of alcohol (e.g. quizzes, guess the number of units in the drinks, best way of sobering up, etc). We are also available to run alcohol awareness workshops for community groups such as parenting groups and provide interactive presentations for any interested community organisation or group (our “pub quizzes” are always popular!). Our emphasis is always on fun and interaction. We don’t believe in being judgemental and we don’t preach as we are not anti-alcohol, but promoting safer drinking.

Campaigns - Each quarter we run a new alcohol awareness campaign to highlight specific risks or trends and encourage safer drinking. 2010/11 campaigns comprised “Older & Wiser”, a training programme focusing on alcohol and the elderly; “Don’t Drink & Fry”, a number of events in conjunction with Beds & Luton Fire & Rescue Service highlighting the increased risk of fires when drinking; “Cheap & Nasty?” a flyer campaign warning of the dangers of pre-loading and “Talking Alcohol” a brand new leaflet for parents to help them discuss drinking with their children. We also ran a year-long campaign “Turn down the V%lume” which highlighted simple ways to reduce units. For details of these and our new campaigns, please click here.

Resources - Over the years the Safer Drinking team have developed a number of specialist alcohol leaflets on subjects such as alcohol and mental health and alcohol and diabetes, as well as practical resources such as tips for cutting down and “down in one!”, a self-help manual. We have also created posters to accompany campaigns. For a full list of resources please click here.