The award-winning SHAHRP research is world first in assessing the impact of alcohol harm reduction program in secondary school. The results from the Randomised Controlled Trial (from baseline to final follow-up 32 months later) showed that students who participated in SHAHRP lessons had 10% greater alcohol related knowledge, consumed 20% less alcohol, were 19.5% less likely to drink to harmful or hazardous levels, experienced 33% less harm associated with their own use of alcohol and 10% less harm associated with other people’s use of alcohol than did the control group (who participated in regular alcohol lessons). The SHAHRP Randomised Controlled Trial has been replicated nationally and internationally.
Because of the change in paradigm from abstinence to harm reduction and the behavioural impact of the SHAHRP intervention, there has been an extensive amount of policy and practice adoption of the SHAHRP intervention globally across 500+ organisations in 54 countries. SHAHRP has also provided foundational knowledge to international policy (n=53), including for the World Health Organisation and the UK Governments. Internationally, adoption is exampled in the education sector where the SHAHRP intervention is provided to 66,000 secondary students in Northern Ireland, England and Wales annually, and in the tertiary sector where, since 2009, 50+ universities have incorporated SHAHRP alcohol harm reduction research into their pre-service teacher curriculum. Recently, NDRI has been invited by the World Health Organisation to provide SHAHRP to low and middle income countries. Other examples of recent international adoption of SHAHRP include: hospitals with alcohol and other drug using patients (Japan); community substance use group work (Ireland), drug recovery (UK); substance use training (Mexico); home schooling education program (USA); justice system (UK); undergraduate teacher training (Sweden); psychopathology intervention in diverse clinical contexts (France).
There have been three international replications of the SHAHRP RCT (two in the UK and one in Brazil) and this has led to additional translation impact to policy and practice in each country.