Eight representatives from Dartmouth's campus improvement team attended the second Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking learning session in Austin, Texas from Monday to Wednesday this week. At the session, representatives from the Collaborative's 32 participating colleges followed up on their discussions of "individual drinkers" from their first June meeting and spoke about addressing environments that facilitate high-risk drinking, according to Aurora Matzkin '97, leader of Dartmouth's campus improvement team in coordination with the National College Health Improvement Project. NCHIP launched the Collaborative, spearheaded by the College, last May.
Over 200 people attended the learning session, including campus administrators, physicians and students, Matzkin said.
College President Jim Yong Kim opened the session on the first night with a speech, according to the College's Director of Media Relations Justin Anderson, who also attended.
"President Kim was able to speak to the success that this method has had in other contexts," Anderson said. "He was able to get up there and say I know this is a long and hard process but it's worked in other contexts. It worked in places that seem far more dire than anything we have talked about here."
In an interview earlier this week with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kim compared his work preventing the spread of disease in Peru and Rwanda to his most recent efforts to combat underage drinking, both of which he worked on with learning collaborations. He said they were surprisingly similar, but that binge drinking offered a unique challenge.
"This is also the most difficult nut to crack I've ever taken on," Kim said. "But knowing what we know about the number of deaths, injuries and sexual assaults, and knowing what we know about the impact on the developing brain, we have no choice. We've got to attack this problem with the best tools we have. I'm not sure what's going to happen, but after this learning collaborative, we will know much more than we ever knew before."
In the first learning session in June, member institutions discussed how to target the individual drinker, Matzkin said. Since the meeting, Dartmouth has implemented a number of initiatives, including the Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention of College Students, commonly referred to as BASICS, and "Plan, Do, Study, Act" cycles known as PDSAs, to help manage current programs, she said.
In Austin, College representatives presented data that they had collected about their efforts, Matzkin said. PDSAs have helped the College manage its progress on new initiatives like BASICS.
All of the 32 schools involved with the Collaborative performed environmental assessments of their campuses before attending the conference, and each chose an area they wanted to focus on to address alcohol abuse. These areas consisted of on campus, Greek life, off campus and retail spaces, Matzkin said.
Dartmouth chose to focus on on-campus settings based on a "data-driven approach," though the improvement team struggled to choose between that and Greek life, Matzkin said. In Austin, different sessions were held so that institutions that identified the same types of spaces, such as Greek life, could conference about strategies to combat drinking in those areas, she said.
Though Dartmouth chose to focus on on-campus spaces, some representatives went to the Greek life meeting. In the sessions, representatives shared strategies.
"We used some time to collaborate and plan about what to do when we come back to campus," she said.
One tool discussed at the conference was mapping to see where high-risk environments are, Matzkin said. Another focuses on communicating with the community about expectations, rules, alcohol policies and the consequences of violating such policies, she said.
Matzkin and her team have returned to Dartmouth with a number of ideas, but have yet to decide exactly what they will implement, she said. Since only eight of the 12 members of the team were in Austin, the whole group will meet next week to decide exactly what strategies it will use.
"We are particularly going to be focusing on high-risk behaviors like pre-gaming in residence halls," she said.
Since the Collaborative was established last June, Matzkin has observed progress, but said more remains to be done in the future.
This year, Dartmouth has seen a slight decline in alcohol-related incidents, Matzkin said. She and her team are still in the process of aggregating fall data to compare with data from past years. Representatives from Dartmouth included Matzkin, College President Jim Yong Kim, head of Green Team Will Conaway '13, Coordinator of the Alcohol and Other Drug Education Program Brian Bowden, physician at Dick's House Ann Bracken, Director of Institutional Research Lynn Foster-Johnson, the College's campus improvement team's student representative Matt Moses '13 and Director of Residential Education Michael Wooten.
Focusing on the individual and the environment are just part of the Collaborative's multi-faceted approach, Matzkin said. At the Collaborative's next meeting in July, whose location has not yet been announced, the group will discuss the systems that campuses have to address high-risk drinking.
