 ADIKTIGE MUZIEK Well, addiction is one of the oldest themes we have in the scientific centre of Tronzo. That's logical because everyone during lifetime is in contact with someone in his family or has some own problems of his own with substance abuse and dependence of substances. In The Netherlands we have, for instance, 80% of the people who are drinking alcohol and moreover 10% of them are going to be dependent or are having problems with the use of alcohol. I'm working at the Academic Collaborative Centre of Addiction as a Junior Researcher on the Theme of Problematic Alcohol Consumption. Many professionals in The Netherlands find it difficult to implement preventive interventions regarding this theme and also feel uncomfortable talking about the theme. This is also the case in hospitals and mental health care organisations, whereas it could actually be a really good site to find people and problem drinkers to intervene at the place. We do research with several organisations in the region, but also on a national level. And these organisations are organisations working in practice on care and prevention for addicts. I work at the Academic Collaborative Centre on Addiction as a PhD student. My research involves investigating age-limit policy for harmful products such as alcohol or tobacco. These age-limit policy measures help to reduce the availability of harmful products such as alcohol and tobacco for young adolescents in society. Zoals een senior researcher, ben ik ervaring in verschillende projecten in de Academic Collaborative Centre of Addiction. Mijn expertise ligt meerdere in tobacco-control en de reductie van problematische alcohol gebruik tussen de adulten. Bijvoorbeeld een project waar ik ervaring in ben, is het over welke factoren belangrijk zijn voor de intervention om problematische alcohol gebruik van de adulten te reduken. En het is een groot societal problem. Bijvoorbeeld, alle adulten drinken veel, omdat ze getuurd zijn of feelend of lonelijk, of gevaarlijk zijn en de alcohol reducteert deze veld. Dus we bevormden de systematische refu en ook een focus-group study om te bekijken of de ontdekkingen beperkt worden door health care professionals. De resultaat showed that there are several factors important when treating all the adults. For example, a slower, softer, less directive approach is really important, but also personal treatment. Focusing on bereavement, grief, loss or isolation. But also social network is really important as all the adults, having a partner or having friends or family. And motivational interviewing was also called, also founded as an important factor. And doing research in co-creation with societal partners is really inspiring, because in this way we can generate impacts. And that's what we do at TANSO. The first project is part of the National Prevention Agreement of the Ministry of Health, well-furnanced sports in the Netherlands. And one of their aims in this agreement was to preventive interventions in hospitals and mental health care organizations should play a bigger role. And for this project I just conducted several interviews to study what potential barriers and facilitators are perceived when implementing these types of interventions. And based on this information and these interviews we wrote an action plan for the ministry. And we also are writing an academic paper on the results of it. The second project I'm working on is part of a hospital that already implemented their preventive interventions themselves, which is already really nice. They saw that many patients of their department were hospitalized frequently due to their problem drinking and they wanted to do something with that. Because in the past they used to only treat the somatic health complaints and not look to the alcohol use or abuse. En now they are. So they asked TANSO to evaluate this project on what is going well and what is going not so well. So they can eventually improve the project further. So I'm now doing a process evaluation for the hospital as well. Altogether I really like that I'm combining science with practice and that I really can translate things that I learned in school and from science academic journals into real life hospital situations basically. In the Netherlands we have age limit policy measures for alcohol and tobacco and these measures are set at 18 years of age. The problem is we don't know if vendors and sellers of these products, if they comply to these age limits. And this is a problem because this could mean that young adolescents or people who are under age are still able to obtain these products. That's a problem because it's harmful for their health on the long term but also in the short term. One of the most effective measures to explore compliance is mystery shopping research in which we deploy 17 year old mystery shoppers. We train these people, we assist them into doing a purchase attempt of alcohol or tobacco products. Mystery shopping is effective because it's a way of measuring real behaviour of alcohol sellers or tobacco sellers. So what we do with our research is we monitor or we explore actual behaviour of these sellers. What you can do on the problem of frequently drinking is people are going to get conscious when they have a soberness period. A certain period of 30 or 40 days they do not drink. In The Netherlands we have a positive lifestyle foundation and this foundation organizes every year two campaigns. One campaign is in January, like Dry January in the UK. And one campaign is before Easter and lasts 40 days. Well there are many organizations in The Netherlands who are carrying out this campaign. We are working together with public health organizations and prevention organizations in addiction. The campaign is called ICPAS. You can translate it as No Thanks. In the last year we had about 50.000 participants in these campaigns. Every year the academic collaborative centre of addiction in Tronzo does big research directly before the campaign en six months after the campaign. The main topics are the benefits the participants experience by quitting their alcohol use during 30 or 40 days. And what we see is that after six months there is a very much improvement in healthy behaviour and in habitual behaviour. Afterwards we can use these results of the research to improve also the campaign. For instance last year the radio commercials of the campaign used figures of the research we did in Tronzo.