Correction appended
Dartmouth will collaborate with 13 other colleges and universities on a new initiative the Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking that the College created to address alcohol use on campuses across the country, College President Jim Yong Kim said in a press conference Monday afternoon. The Collaborative is an information exchange partnership that will track the progress of initiatives designed to reduce harmful alcohol-related incidents and binge drinking, Kim said.
Each participating school will appoint a team of students, administrators and faculty members to participate in monthly conference calls regarding various approaches to alcohol policies on member campuses, according to Kim. The Collaborative is the first product of the National College Health Improvement Project, a partnership between the College and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, according to a College press release.
Boston University, Cornell University, Duke University, Northwestern University, Ohio University, Princeton University, Purdue University, Stanford University, Wesleyan University, the University of Wyoming, Stony Brook University, Frostburg State University and Sewanee: The University of the South also joined the Collaborative, according to the press release. The Collaborative will continue to accept member schools until May 20, Kim said.
The Collaborative's member schools will attend three "learning sessions" every six months, which will require that schools collect, analyze and present data on any programs targeting high-risk drinking on their campuses, Paul Batalden, a TDI health policy and clinical practice professor, said at the press conference. The learning sessions will require schools to present a poster and a summary of the data that they assemble prior to the session, he said.
Dartmouth will host the first of the three learning sessions in June, Batalden said. The first three sessions will focus on "the individual," "the environment" and the interaction between the two, respectively, according to Batalden. Collaborative members will meet in January 2012 and July 2012, and will publish the Collaborative's findings at the conclusion of the meetings, the press release said.
"We're now turning our attention to structuring the actual learning sessions where people come together to learn and update themselves about the evidence and design and test change," Batalden said. "This idea of a learning collaborative grew out of this desire to bring evidence into practice, to make change happen and to learn in the process."
The percentage of college students who binge drink is close to 40 percent, Kim said. Consuming five or more drinks in two hours or less is considered binge drinking for males and consuming four or more drinks in two hours or less is considered binge drinking for females, according to Kim.
Implementing policies to reduce the harmful effects of alcohol and the overall level of binge drinking on college campuses is not the same as improving the situation, Kim said. Due to "overstretched budgets" and a lack of institutions like TDI, many universities have been unable to measure the results of their harm-reduction initiatives, he said.
"Our goal is quite simple we want to see dramatic reductions in harm and the overall level of binge drinking on every single campus," Kim said.
The Collaborative is based on a holistic approach to quality improvement, Kim said. He recalled an experience he had working on a quality-improvement collaborative with his wife Younsook Lim in Rwanda, where collaboration between clinics from various areas and people from a variety of professional backgrounds led to results that surpassed the achievements of any individual clinic, Kim said.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention identified binge drinking among young people as a "huge public health threat" that has yet to be addressed, Kim said. By working with members at the CDC, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Collaborative plans to apply the quality-improvement model to the issue of binge drinking, Kim said.
"You have a complicated problem, embroiled in society complexity, that changes from year-to-year and has to do with individual human behavior and rules and regulations, but probably more importantly with how the community behaves together to stop the problem," Kim said. "It was exactly the kind of problem that could be approached through this quality-improvement method."
Kim pointed to the Green Team initiative as an example of a successful student-led initiative to reduce the harmful effects associated with drinking.
"Preliminary data suggested that [the Green Team] is having a very positive impact," he said. "We are looking forward to sharing that innovation here at Dartmouth with other schools."
Kim cited Purdue as a university that has successfully developed alternative, substance-free social events. Purdue currently operates a program called the Grand Alternative, which is designed to offer substance-free events in the spring, Jeanne Norberg, Purdue's director of public information, said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Purdue will also require incoming students to complete an online alcohol education and prevention course called AlcoholEdu before the beginning of the school year, Norberg said. The AlcoholEdu initiative and the Grand Alternative are examples of programs that Purdue may contribute to the Collaborative, according to Norberg.
This past summer, the College replaced its AlcoholEdu program with the online alcohol education program MyStudentBody, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Another "10 or so" schools might enlist in the Collaborative, Kim said in an interview with The Dartmouth Editorial Board.
