In acute hospital settings, alcohol withdrawal often causes significant management
prohlems and complicates a wide variety of concurrent conditions, placing a huge
burden on the NHS. A significant number of critical incidents around patients who
were undergoing detoxification in a general hospital setting led to the need for a
project to implement and evaluate an evidence-based approach to the management
of alcohol detoxification—a project that included a pre-intervention case note
audit, the implementation of an evidence-based symptom-triggered detoxification
protocol, and a post-intervention case note audit. This change in practice resulted in
an average reduction of almost 60% in length of hospital stay and a 66% reduction
in the amount of chlordiazepoxide used in detoxification, as well as highlighting
that 10% of the sample group did not display any signs of withdrawal and did not
require any medication. Even with these reductions, no patient post-intervention
developed any severe signs of withdrawal phenomena, such as seizures or delirium
tremens. The savings to the trust (The Pennine Acute Hospital Trust) are obvious,
but the development of a consistent, quality service will lead to fewer long-term
negative efi^ects for patients that can be caused by detoxification. This work is a
project evaluation of a locally implemented strategy, which, it was hypothesised,
would improve care by providing an individualised treatment plan for the
management of alcohol withdrawal symptoms.