Aims: The purpose of the study was to determine how the stakeholders involved in alcohol policy in Slovenia view the importance and impact of alcohol policy measures in alcohol-related harm reduction, and to identify their interests.
Methods: The questionnaire comprising 25 statements across nine alcohol policy domains was sent to 320 stakeholders involved in alcohol policy in Slovenia. They were divided into the following four main groups: governmental organisations, public health organisations, non-governmental organisations and alcohol industry. The data collected were analysed using the SPSS programme. Differences between the groups concerning their views on individual alcohol policy interventions were measured using the ANOVA and t-test.
Results: Factor analysis of stakeholders' views identified three main alcohol policy platforms: education, regulation and pricing. All the participating stakeholders emphasized education, communication, training and raising public awareness as the most important activities that had the greatest impact on the reduction of alcohol-related harm. Governmental and non-governmental organisations and public health institutions assigned significantly higher scores to the impact of regulatory alcohol policy measures and to the importance of regulatory policies on reducing alcohol-related harm than the alcohol industry. The alcohol industry perceived the pricing measures taken to reduce harm done by alcohol as having a significantly lower impact and lesser importance than did the group of other stakeholders.
Conclusions: Like similar studies of attitudes towards alcohol policy in Europe, our research showed that different stakeholders are guided by different interests in relation to particular alcohol policy measures; however, these differences were lesser than those identified at the EU level. In spite of stakeholders' different interests and views concerning particular alcohol strategies and alcohol policy in general, we have identified common grounds for them to work together to prepare better and more effective measures of alcohol-related harm prevention in Slovenia.
