Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Alcohol consumption constitutes a serious public health issue in Ecuador, with per capita consumption of alcohol increasing in the last three decades from 3.3 liters of ethanol per adult in 1990 to 5.0 liters per adult in 2017 and is predicted to increase to 11.4 liters by 2030. However, there is considerable variation as well as gaps in the data related to alcohol consumption and harms in Ecuador. These factors limit the ability to accurately assess the magnitude of Ecuador's alcohol use. Accordingly, consultations with key stakeholders concerning alcohol consumption, harms measurement, and policy formulation and adoption of such policies which can reduce the harmful consumption of alcohol can help address research gaps and are crucial for guiding the development and implementation of alcohol policy initiatives. This planning grant will support meetings with stakeholders representing community members, healthcare providers, and government officials, with the goal achieving the following aims: 1)to make an inventory and discuss data sources used to measure the patterns of alcohol and data sources used to measure the health harms due to alcohol consumption in Ecuador, 2)to discuss current Ecuadorian alcohol policies and to create a report of synthesized findings for dissemination to stakeholders, and 3)to develop a full-scale grant proposal. The proposed project aligns with the roadmap of CIHR, specifically with research priority C, by focusing on prevention of the harms caused by alcohol through improved monitoring and surveillance. This work will bring to the forefront alcohol consumption and alcohol-attributable health harms, and will create a network of researchers, policy stakeholders, and policy makers to identify knowledge gaps and research priorities in alcohol research and to determine how best to address these gaps and priorities in a resource-limited setting.