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This paper aims to investigate the cultural meanings of excessive drinking in three different countries with different levels of alcohol use chosen as case studies of wider geographies representing Northern (Denmark), Southern (Italy) and Eastern (Estonia) Europe.

Data were collected according to the Reception Analytical Group Interview method, using video clips as stimuli to enhance comparability. Eight online focus groups were organized in each country for a total number of 128 participants. Symbolic boundaries defining what drinking patterns are socially acceptable were then analysed to look at cross-national variations.

Results show how different conceptualizations of excessive drinking persist, although a convergence process among drinking patterns is also observed, which suggests that differences mainly depend on meanings and values attributed to intoxication. These are both rooted in the traditional drinking cultures and affected by ongoing social and economic change processes.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability, even at country level, as there are differences also within the same drinking culture; however, addressing these differences was beyond the scope of the present study, which aimed to contribute to understanding persisting differences in European drinking culture despite different drivers seem to act for globalization of drinking habits.

The paper includes implications for the development of tailored and effective prevention messages, considering rooted attitudes and cultural values attached to drinking and drunkenness in different European geographies, which are also related to conceptualizations of risks and pleasure.

This paper fulfils an identified need to understand persisting differences in alcohol-related behaviours and outcome in different European countries emerging from quantitative data.

In this article, we return to a piece of work we did with two NHS trusts in the mid 1990s that focused squarely on tackling institutional racism. We do this for two reasons. First, because we feel that the current context for equalities may be obscuring the need to continue to find ways to tackle institutional racism. Second, we brought together very achievable survey and group work techniques in a co‐produced process, which makes tackling institutional racism less laden with rhetoric and much more of a practical proposition. This article articulates a three‐staged approach to identifying racism operating inside the trusts, an appraisal of the experience of black patients and the development of learning groups. In these learning groups, black and white practitioners and managers engaged with each other on their impacts and relationships with black patients, thereby changing their practices with all patients. What achieves equality of health service response from this experience is the creation of an environment in which practitioners can become self‐motivated in re‐working ‘with and for themselves’ the way they work with patients based on a recognition of racial identities in service relationships.