Effect of Community Support on the Implementation of Primary Health Care-Based Measurement of Alcohol Consumption

Alcohol measurement delivered by health care providers in primary health care settings is an efficacious and cost-effective intervention to reduce alcohol consumption among patients. However, this intervention is not yet routinely implemented in practice. Community support has been recommended as a strategy to stimulate the delivery of alcohol measurement by health care providers, yet evidence on the effectiveness of community support in this regard is scarce. The current study used a pre-post quasi-experimental design in order to investigate the effect of community support in three Latin American municipalities in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru on health care providers’ rates of measuring alcohol consumption in their patients. The analysis is based on the first 5 months of implementation. Moreover, the study explored possible mechanisms underlying the effects of community support, through health care providers’ awareness of support, as well as their attitudes, subjective norms, self-efficacy, and subsequent intention toward delivering the intervention. An ANOVA test indicated that community support had a significant effect on health care providers’ rates of measuring alcohol consumption in their patients ( F (1, 259) = 4.56, p = 0.034, η p 2 = 0.018). Moreover, a path analysis showed that community support had a significant indirect positive effect on providers’ self-efficacy to deliver the intervention ( b = 0.07, p = 0.008), which was mediated through awareness of support. Specifically, provision of community support resulted in a higher awareness of support among health care providers ( b = 0.31, p