A previous post discussed how community asset mapping benefits health promoters. This post describes how I created a visual asset map using the freely available Google My Maps tool. In this project, I chose stroke survivors and their caregivers as my target audience. It was because of a project that…

Asset mapping strategy brings many benefits to health promoters, resource and patient care navigators. It helps us, Of course, it helps us to identify gaps also. All in all, the strategy helps us to visualize a more realistic picture of our community. In fact, asset mapping should be an integral…

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-SA 4.0). R is an open-source data analytics and data visualization software program. It is used for statistical modeling, both linear and non-linear, usual statistical tests, time-series analysis, and clustering, etc. That means it is free and recognized by even peer-reviewed science journals. It was…

Is it possible to quantify alcohol-related problems? Among many, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) is one of the most widely used tools to quantify and categorise risk levels for alcohol-related problems. This 10-item instrument came out of a multi-centre study executed by the World Health Organization (WHO). I…

In my last two posts, I discussed the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), the standard drink size concept, and the challenges faced when administering the AUDIT’s quantify-frequency questions.  In this post, I will discuss how I met the above challenges. Anyone interested can adapt the steps I followed. I…

While I was validating the AUDIT – a tool widely used to quantify alcohol consumption and related problems – to the Sri Lankan context, although researchers and practitioners all over the world have been using it for decades, I faced many difficulties in translating its first three questions: the quantity-frequency…

The problem Estimating the amount of ethanol consumed accurately is difficult but essential to identify risk groups for alcohol-related problems.  The varying ethanol content in different alcohol brands becomes one of the main challenges. The ethanol content in different types of alcoholic beverages varies as follows; 5% in beer; 10%…