A new App is under development to help people reduce their risk of driving while over the limit the morning after drinking alcohol.
The App is being developed as part of the Morning After drink drive campaign and will be available by April 2015.
The Morning After campaign has been around since 2006. During 2014 the campaign website received 369,000 page views and 126,000 visits from people wanting information about morning after drink driving, and how long it takes for alcohol to pass through the body. And more than 40 local authority road safety teams have participated in the campaign in the past three years.
The website currently has a very simple morning after calculator which will be replaced by the App which will be available for use on the website and to download for use on a smartphone.
Sally Bartrum, Morning After campaign manager, said: “Let’s be quite clear about one thing – this App is not intended to help people work out how much they can drink on a night out before driving home.
“Our advice to people is if they are drinking any amount of alcohol on a night out – even one drink – they should leave the car at home and make alternative arrangements. The App won’t help you if you are arrested for drink driving – we will be making this quite clear on the campaign website and in the App itself.
“What it will do is enable people to calculate roughly when it will be safe to drive the morning after drinking alcohol. And it can help them work out when they should stop drinking alcohol if they have to drive the following morning.
“The App bases its calculation from the time you stop, not when you start drinking. Some people say this is over-cautious, but we’d rather be safe than sorry.
“In a perfect world, everyone would refrain from drinking any significant quantity of alcohol the evening before driving, but in the real world that’s not going to happen. The App will enable responsible users to make a better informed decision about when they should stop drinking alcohol if they have to drive the following morning.”
The App is part of the 2015 Morning After campaign which is available for road safety teams to join for a fee of £995 plus VAT for the 12-month period. Click here to download the campaign proposal or contact Sally Bartrum on 01379 650112 for more information.
This isn’t about reinventing the wheel, its about improving the information out there. The NHS and the DrinkAware trackers give you information about the number of units you drink but doesn’t really put them into context about how it effects your everyday life i.e. are you impaired the next day, which could effect your driving but also other aspects of your life, are you fit to work? OK at looking after the children? use machinery etc.
I’ve used the Morning After campaign in a range of ways over the years to highlight how alcohol affects you. It’s part of our Alcohol Reduction Harm Strategy and links into more than just road safety.
The public health teams have used the leaflets to have a conversation with people about health. They start by promoting the drink driving message and it ends with people reviewing how much alcohol they have each week and the reasons why.
So well done to the team for taking the campaign forward. Keep the good work up.
Ruth Gore, Safer Roads Humber
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Trudi
The ‘Morning After’ calculator/app is being developed to replace the existing out of date system currently used on the Morning After website and it seemed sensible to develop a downloadable app for smart phones at the same time.
Why do it? Well, the Morning After website received 160,000+ hits during December 2015 alone so there is obviously a need for this kind of information.
The App will be free to download from the Morning After website and from the websites of those local authority road safety teams that participate in the Morning After campaign. We hope that as such it will provide specific information to help a significant number of people avoid driving while (perhaps unwittingly) over the limit the morning after drinking alcohol.
Simon, Morning After Campaign
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This has very much already been done – not only do we have the “Beer Monkey”
http://www.thebeermonkey.co.uk/index.php/home/about-the-app
The novelty of which won over the target audience, but for the ‘serious’ end of the campaign market there is the NHS app:
http://www.nhs.uk/tools/pages/iphonedrinks.aspx
Come on people – we should not be spending money on reinventing the wheel.
Trudi, Birmingham
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Hasn’t this already been done? Sounds very similar to thebeermonkey.co.uk, which is free to download.
Mandy, West Midlands
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Fantastic idea, the morning after is very much overlooked…
Greg Henry
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