Jersey Alcohol Profile 2018

27 February 2019

This publication reports on the consumption of alcohol in Jersey and the subsequent effect on Islanders’ health and wellbeing. Topics covered include: alcohol consumption and price; drinking behaviour of both adults and children; alcohol-related hospitalisation and death; and some of the wider social issues related to alcohol such as crime and social security payments.

The report findings include:

the average alcohol consumption per Jersey adult (aged 15 years or older) in 2018 was 11.8 litres of pure alcohol per year

while this figure dropped from 16.2 litres per year in 2000 to 11.5 litres per year in 2015, it has remained fairly constant since.
11.8 litres of pure alcohol per year is equivalent to approximately 8 pints of beer or 2.5 bottles of wine per week.

the price of alcohol in Jersey, relative to other household expenditure, increased between 2008 and 2015 but has remained flat since
drinking behaviour in Jersey differed to that in England:

11% of Jersey adults were teetotal compared 20% of adults in England
in 2017 the average alcohol consumption per adult was 20% higher in Jersey (11.6 litres per year) than in the UK (9.7 litres per year)

since 2006, the percentage of children in Years 8 and 10 that have never drunk alcohol has increased
in 2017, rates of alcohol-specific hospital admissions for under 18s were significantly higher in Jersey than in England, for both males and females
in 2017, 945 hospital admissions were specifically related to alcohol. This number equates to an age-standardised rate of 900 admissions per 100,000 population, significantly higher than the English age-standardised rate of 563 per 100,000 population
over the three-year period 2015-17, there were 40 alcohol-specific deaths in Jersey; this number represents an age-standardised rate of 12.8 per 100,000 population, similar to the England age-standardised rate of 10.6 per 100,000 population
alcohol played a role in 14% of all crimes recorded in Jersey in 2018. Of specific types of crime:

1 in 4 assaults and more than 1 in 3 serious assaults were recorded by police as involving alcohol
two-fifths of domestic assaults involved alcohol
two-fifths of assaults and half of the serious assaults in the St Helier night-time economy involved alcohol

in 2018, claims due to alcohol-related sickness and ailments totalled £600,000. Almost half of this amount was due to 75 claims related specifically to alcoholism

R AlcoholProfile2018 20190227.pdf