Student awareness of campus medical amnesty policies

ObjectiveExamine students' awareness of medical amnesty policies and the influence of policy awareness on the expected consequences of bystander help seeking in alcohol-related emergencies among student-athletes and non-athletes. Participants: 1,012 college students. Methods: Spearman's correlation and chi-square tests were used to examine accuracy in awareness of amnesty policies. Nominal logistic regression was used to test the relationship between amnesty policy awareness and expected consequences of bystander help seeking. Results: About 25% of students were unsure if their school had an amnesty policy; of these students, 67% attended schools with such a policy. Students who were unsure about the presence of amnesty policies were more likely to expect serious negative consequences of calling for help for both non-athlete peers (B = 1.152 p < 0.001) and student-athlete peers (B = 0.887 p = 0.001). Conclusions: Greater attention is needed to how amnesty policies are implemented on college campuses, including how they are communicated to and interpreted by student-athletes.