Effects of a community intervention to reduce the serving of alcohol to intoxicated patrons

Abstract

Previous research has documented that multi-component community-based interventions can have a significant impact on over-serving of alcohol when training and house policies are combined with effective law enforcement. The present findings also demonstrate that comprehensive Responsible Beverage Service (RBS) interventions applied at a local community level can be effective in decreasing service to intoxicated clients in a Nordic context.

Factors associated with over‐serving at drinking establishments

“…Our observation of a higher service rate later at night is consistent with previous observations [17,20,43], as was the increased likelihood of over-serving with greater intoxication level of other patrons [17,43,44] and with high music (or noise) level [18]. Consistent with Hughes et al [18], we found that over-serving was associated with a sum-score of indicators of problematic bars.…”

“…We found that a high intoxication level among patrons was associated with over-serving and the widespread occurrence of intoxicated patrons may be regarded in the context of the intoxication-oriented Norwegian drinking culture. Similar observations were reported in studies from Finland [17,43], which is also perceived as an intoxication-oriented culture [52,53]. We may assume that when most or all of the customers in a bar are intoxicated, intoxication is the norm and therefore rejection of service to most or all customers becomes very difficult.…”

“…Similarly, an Australian study [47] found no statistically significant gender difference in survey respondents' reports of servers intervening when the respondents showed signs of intoxication at drinking establishments. However, despite our large sample of purchase attempts, we did not find statistically significant associations between over-serving and some factors that were previously reported to be significant, such as the presence of a bouncer [17,18,43], queue at the bar [43], crowding [46], and the age and gender of the servers [14,15,17,43,46]. Several factors may explain the high rate of over-serving we observed in Norwegian bars and pubs.…”

“…Despite widespread implementation, these programmes are mostly ineffective at preventing alcohol sales to intoxicated patrons [7][8][9] Thus, despite prohibition and server training programmes, customers who are clearly intoxicated are likely to be served [2,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. In the following, we refer to this as over-serving.…”

“…Some studies have found that over-serving is more likely to occur later in the evening and in drinking establishments with mainly young guests [20], in venues with a bouncer present, and in venues with a generally high level of intoxication among the guests [17]. Bartender characteristics that have been found to increase the likelihood of over-serving include being male [14,17] and young [14,16]. Some of these findings were also reported in a previous systematic review [21], although they were not entirely consistent.…”