Hello Sunday Morning

Background

Only 30% of Australians who need support to reduce their drinking are able to access it. As a result, many people don't get support and end up developing chronic alcohol use issues throughout their lives. Through innovative, digital health coaching this project aimed to provide alcohol support to 100,000 Australians regardless of their circumstances, assisting the prevention of chronic disease on a national scale.

Aim & objectives

The project had four main goals:

1. Create a health coaching service for Daybreak members by January 2018.
   
   
2. Reduce harmful alcohol consumption by 35–50% among program participants, and create a 25% improvement in symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.
3. Disseminate the project learnings and outcomes through the community and health sector.
   
   
4. Secure an ongoing commitment with the Federal Government, with a goal of securing $800,000 annually.

Approach

To achieve the goals of the project and to successfully integrate Daybreak into the Australian health system, Hello Sunday Morning developed and implemented a new health coaching feature into Daybreak, which represented the clinical backbone of the program, providing members with 1:1 support with a qualified professional.

Extensive promotion and marketing was undertaken to ensure that those who needed access to Daybreak, knew how to access it; the aim being for 100,000 Australians to access the program over the project timeline.

The team also did extensive market research to gauge general practitioners’ reactions to Daybreak and their willingness to engage with the program, before rolling out training across GPs to better integrate Daybreak within this network.

In partnership with the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University, Hello Sunday Morning undertook a Randomised Control Trial to compare the impact of receiving online health coaching within the Daybreak program with no coaching within Daybreak.

Outcomes

Hello Sunday Morning faced a number of challenges delivering this project, requiring adjustment of the project scope. The main three changes made were:

1. Reducing Daybreak acquisition target from 100,000 to 70,000 
   The number of people in the community who need the more intensive intervention focused support of Daybreak was lower than the number of people wanting the more general support that was provided by the previous Daybreak program.
2. Reduced Health Coaching availability from 24/7 to Monday – Friday 
   Members weren’t expecting it to be a 24/7 service, which is typically provided in a crisis setting.
3.  Randomised Control Trial  
   A key learning from the trial was that Daybreak needed to be rebuilt to support high-quality data collection in order to undertake further high-quality research and evaluation.

Despite these challenges, the project had a tremendous impact and delivered some great results. Some of these included:

• Daybreak supported over 55,000 Australians
• Over 5,370 Daybreak members accessed the Health Coaching service, receiving support for their increased needs.
• An evaluation found that those who used Daybreak for 3 months reduced their alcohol consumption by half (from 37 drinks per week to 17) and reduced their alcohol affected days from 3.5 to 0.5 days per week.
• GP webinars and training sessions were held with 10 Primary Health Networks and GPs were highly receptive and found Daybreak to be relevant to their patients' needs.
• The Federal Government contracted Hello Sunday Morning for three years ($3M) to provide 8,000 Australians a year with free access to Daybreak
• Further investment of $2.8M from philanthropy to develop Daybreak.

Impact

In response to COVID-19, the Federal Government provided Hello Sunday Morning with a 12-month $1.5 million boost to support a projected 25% increase in people expected to access Daybreak. 

In June 2020, measures were implemented in Daybreak to enable tracking of alcohol consumption and psychological distress across members over time on an individual level. Over a 12-week period, these measures quantified a 73% reduction in the number of Daybreak members who are consuming 6+ drinks multiple times per week, along with 80% of the membership reducing their psychological distress.

In December 2021, The Ian Potter Foundation awarded Hello Sunday Morning a major grant ($2.5 million over 5 years) to build its capacity and enable the organisation to continually improve the quality and safety of its services.