Underage drinking
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading More or Less from the BBC. This is the version of the programme first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Harford.
Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme which drinks deeply from the glass of statistical good sense. This week we return to Trumpton.
Good heavens, there's water dripping through the ceiling.
But first...
Almost 300 children under the age of 12 were admitted to A&E units across the UK last year after drinking too much.
This BBC story was picked up by the national press.
Hundreds of drunk under 11s sent to A&E. Almost 300 11-year-olds admitted to A&E for alcohol abuse, up by a third in a single year. Army of children overwhelming A&E with drug and alcohol problems.
An army? 300 children's almost one a day somewhere in the UK, so I rather hope A&E units are less than overwhelmed by that. But still, 11-year-olds, it's pretty worrying. And an army of loyal listeners emailed us at moreorless at bbc.co.uk to say they thought the story was absolutely shocking, shockingly implausible. And one of them was James Turner. I saw this story on the BBC News site and I couldn't help but think, bunkum. We thought we'd better run the story through our great machine of statistical truth-telling, Hannah Barnes.
Well, this story originated right here at the BBC at Radio 5 Live. It started with a Freedom of Information request from the Victoria Derbyshire programme to every NHS trust and health board across the UK. They asked how many under-18s had been to an A&E department for an alcohol-related condition over the past five years.
And one of the headline findings was that the numbers included 300 children aged 11 or under who'd been to A&E in just the past year. But I've got to ask, Hannah, is that a big number?
How many children under 12 were reportedly admitted to A&E for alcohol-related issues?
I mean, I know no young child should be drinking, but do we really have an army of drunk infants?
Well, there are about 9 million 11s and under in the UK.
So 300 is a very, very small proportion.
And even if we just consider 11-year-olds, there are 700,000 of those.
OK, so 300 is not a big number. But still, the trend looks alarming. The headlines have said it's up by a third in just one year.
It was, but it's a very messy number. It's so small that it bounces up and down. It's up almost a third on last year, but down a fifth on two years ago.
Now this number may look erratic, but there are fairly reliable, nationally collected figures on young people in general and whether they drink.
Yeah, and the overall trend is down. The most authoritative survey on underage drinking, which looks at 11 to 15-year-olds in England, shows that the proportion of these children drinking has gone down steadily over the last decade, from about 60% who say they've ever tried alcohol to about 40% in 2012. But the young people who are drinking... seem to be drinking slightly more. But the BBC report itself showed that the number of under-18s attending A&E for these alcohol-related reasons appears to have steadily fallen over the last five years, from around 8,100 in 2008 to nearly 6,600 in the last year.
And this term used in the FOI request, alcohol-related condition, you just know we're going to find some argument with a term like that. It's not the same as drunk, even though that's how most of the media have reported these 11-year-olds.
And actually, we found out it may have included occasions where the young person themselves hadn't had any alcohol at all.
Yes, we find ourselves considering the possibility of alcohol-free, alcohol-related incidents.
Yeah, I mean, we called the NHS trusts, which seem to have the highest numbers of young people attending A&E for these alcohol-related conditions, and we got some surprising answers. For instance, NHS Grampian have the second highest number for alcohol-related cases involving the under-18s in the last year. When they're filling in their forms to record A&E attendances, they don't have a code for drunk as a skunk. So instead... they might add some descriptive phrases in what's called a free text field, basically notes and comments section.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:06
2
How many children under 12 were reportedly admitted to A&E for alcohol-related issues?
2:06–11:04
3
Is 300 under-11 A&E cases actually a large or alarming number?
11:04–17:07
4
How reliable are FOI 'alcohol-related' codes for identifying drunk children?
17:07–19:36
5
Could A&E free-text searches count non-drinking incidents as alcohol cases?
19:36–26:13
6
Why do different school surveys give conflicting figures for 10–11 year olds drinking?
26:13–27:42