Before “they” Need Those Services
The chief executive of Drinkaware and I want the same thing. We just mean different things by the word "reach".
I read an interview this week that stopped me at the third paragraph.
Karen Tyrell, the chief executive of Drinkaware, was talking to The Grocer about a new five-year strategy. Near the top she explained what had drawn her to the job. It was the chance, she said, to “reach people before they need those services.” She had spent a long career in treatment. She had seen what happens when the problem is already developed, when the liver is already failing, when the only options left are the hard ones. She wanted to get there earlier.
I have written some version of that sentence more times than I can count. It is the reason I built Sol. Not a treatment service, not a replacement for one, but something that meets a person in the long quiet stretch before any of that, when the worry is real but the language for it has not arrived yet. To read the thought back in someone else’s words, someone with two decades in the field and a national platform, was a strange kind of company.
We are, on the face of it, after the same thing.
Which is exactly why I think the rest of the interview is worth sitting with. Agreeing on where to stand does not mean agreeing on what to do once you are there. Tyrell and I both want to reach the worried drinker early. The interesting question is what the word reach is carrying.
For Drinkaware, reach means information. This is not a criticism, or not yet. It is simply the model. A drinking check that scores your week. A quick quiz by the till in Tesco. A campaign that asks football fans to look honestly at their habits. A unit count, a risk band, a page you can click through to. And the model works, at the level it is built to work. More than eight in ten adults in this country now drink inside the low-risk guidelines, up from just over three-quarters in 2018. That is not nothing. That is millions of people nudged, over years, toward a slightly safer relationship with a drink. Population health is patient work and it moves the curve. Anyone who has helped move it has earned the right to be proud.
But the strategy Tyrell has just launched is not aimed at the population in general. It is aimed at a specific seven million: the one in five adults drinking somewhere between fifteen and forty-nine units a week. The increasing-risk drinker. Not dependent, not in crisis, not presenting anywhere. Drinking a little more than is good for them, often at home, often alone, and, in a great many cases, quietly aware of it.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. That person, for the most part, already knows.
They know the units are high. They have done the mental arithmetic at six in the morning, lying awake, adding up the week. They have read the label. They have seen the campaign. Information is the one thing they are not short of. You cannot inform someone into change who is already, privately, over-informed and under-supported. The gap in their life is not a fact they are missing. It is a place to put the worry that does not require them to first become a case.
That is the line I would underline in the whole interview. And to her credit, Tyrell gets close to it herself. Talking about health labels, she says the point of a good one is to give a person somewhere to go if they want a bit more advice or support. I agree completely. The signpost matters. But a signpost is only as useful as whatever stands on the other side of it, and that is the part the information model has never quite solved. You do the quiz, you get your score, you are pointed onward. Onward to what? For most people the honest answer is a leaflet, a helpline they will not ring, or a service they are nowhere near ready to walk into.
What I have spent my time building is the thing that waits on the other side of the signpost. Sol is not a service you attend. There is no form, no triage, no threshold you have to be unwell enough to cross. It is someone to talk to, available at the hour the worry actually surfaces, which is rarely nine to five and rarely convenient. It does not score you and hand you back. It stays in the conversation. It holds the question open instead of closing it down with a fact.
Elsewhere in the interview Tyrell says something I think is exactly right, and it is worth ending on. Nobody, she says, wants to be nagged. True, and it is the quiet failure of a great deal of well-meant public health. But I would push the thought one step further than she does. The opposite of being nagged is not being better informed. You can deliver a fact gently, wrap it in warmth, set it on a beautifully designed label, and it is still a fact being delivered at a person. The opposite of being nagged is being heard. Those are different acts. One transmits. The other receives.
Almost all of the machinery around drinking is built to transmit. It tells, warns, scores, signposts. Very little of it is built to receive, to let a person say the thing out loud, without consequence, and be met rather than measured. That asymmetry is the whole space Sol is trying to occupy. Not in competition with Drinkaware, whose research and reach I would not want to be without, but in the gap its model structurally leaves. The gap between knowing and being able to say.
There is a harder thread in the interview that I will touch only lightly, because it deserves a piece of its own and because the cheap version of it is beneath the argument. Drinkaware is funded in large part by the industry whose product it exists to make safer. Tyrell is clear that this does not oblige the charity to carry the industry’s interests, and I take her at her word. But it does help explain the shape of the model. An organisation built inside the drinks system will tend to reach for the tools that fit neatly alongside it: information, labels, checks, partnerships. Tools that inform the drinker rather than sit with them. That is not a conspiracy. It is closer to gravity.
So I find myself grateful for the interview and slightly haunted by it. Grateful because the most recognisable figure in this space has said out loud that the goal is to reach people before they need services, which is the precise ground I have staked out. Haunted because reaching them is only the beginning. The measure that matters is not whether the hand goes up. It is what happens in the ninety seconds after it does.
That is the part I am trying to get right.
Karen Tyrell was interviewed by James Beeson for The Grocer, 26 June 2026: “Karen Tyrell: ‘Drinkaware is not a trade association’”.