G7 reflection: What are the next steps for global gambling harm prevention?
With the delegates from the recent G7 Summit now back home from their Canadian expedition, we’ve moved from the time for talking to the time for action when it comes to following up our message of gambling harm prevention from the event.
Our principal consultant Dan Spencer used the platform of the G7 Canada Brain Economy Summit to call for a holistic and collaborative global approach to preventing gambling-related harm, backed up by the other panelists on the ‘Advancing Whole-System Approaches to Gambling Harm in High-Risk Sectors’ discussion during the Global Forum on Responsible Gaming and Gambling Policy.
Spencer was joined on the panel by Dan Umfleet, CEO, Kindbridge; Rasmus Kjaergaard, CEO, Mindway AI; and Mark Hicks, managing director, NCAA, with moderation from Brianne Doura-Schawohl, principal, BDS Consulting.
In order to try and maintain the momentum and awareness generated at the event in Calgary, we sought responses from all four panelists to determine how they found the response from the audience at the G7 Canada Brain Economy Summit, and what they believed that audience needs to do next to ensure that positive action comes from it…
Dan Spencer
“The G7 Canada Brain Economy Summit was an event focused on promoting positive mental health all around the world. It focused on using brain economy as a measure of how healthy our brains are to promote positive growth across jurisdictions. It’s a new concept to me, but a very interesting one.
“I hope to see more events like this in the future. I think the message was received loud and clear that we need to take a bigger, wider, holistic approach to preventing gambling-related harm. In the room we had several different opinions from academics to operators, to policy makers and lawmakers, and that message came across very, very clearly that we need to take that holistic wide approach to preventing that gambling related harm.
“An interesting point that we talked about on the panel was following the life cycle of the gambler, right from the introduction to gambling, the education and the awareness that we focus on in the early days of a gambler.
“It continues right up until the point where they’re gambling and early detection methods, how we notify those signs of harm in the early days and intervene at a crucial key moment where we can really make a difference, following it through to the access to treatment and the prevention of relapse too.
“One takeaway from the summit is that there’s no magical silver bullet that’s going to solve gambling related harm. We all need to come together and collaborate across many different stakeholders, many different opinions, to ensure that we reach all of the key touch points in the lifecycle of the gambler and non gambler to ensure that we keep populations safe from harms.”
Dan Umfleet
“We work with operators, we work with regulators. We’ve worked with legislators in the past who are looking to craft bills. We collaborate with several other health systems and healthcare providers, and now we’ve started collaborating with banks and military. Bringing everybody to the table I think is extremely important.
“To ensure this event has a long-term impact, we need to bring in more stakeholders from various backgrounds. We had good representation at the G7 Brain Economy Summit. We saw regulators, we saw ROGA, which represented some of the operators. We saw healthcare backgrounds, we saw some policy makers.
“I think widening this out to a roader lens and bringing in some additional stakeholders from other industry backgrounds that can give us some parallel guidance is going to do the trick.
“The timeliness is key. Basically, get the meeting set and keep the cadence rolling and just try to build on the momentum.”
Mark Hicks
“It was critical for that group to hear about the NCAA experience, mainly because we offer a very unique perspective into a narrow subset of our population, primarily student athletes, 18 to 24, both men and women.
“They all come from different backgrounds, but that community and understanding how we address it – and how others may see opportunity – I think was really important to hear, talking about the NCAA and how we’re tackling harm prevention and education around sports gaming.
“An important aspect of working in this role the last several years, and witnessing the stories of student-athletes who’ve come through our system having already had problems with gambling, is that there’s still a need to be able to reach the people of influence in the young people’s lives.
“I think there’s a lot of ground to be plowed when it comes to really educating the adults who are in a position of influence over young people about the potential dangers; how to engage in betting if they are going to engage in betting in a safe way. Think about a fiscally responsible way and understand that while it can be entertaining, it might be fun, there’s also some danger here.
“Educating and what I call ‘influencing the influencers’ is a strategy that I think is an opportunity for the community here at the G7 to really think about, and also how we’re going to approach changing the mindset and culture around how we influence and educate our own young people.
“Cross collaboration is key. At this summit there are some really smart people, very educated people from different backgrounds that all have a piece of helping set policy from a perspective of protecting young people.
“I think encouraging that collaboration to continue is going to be key to advancing whatever policies come out of this weekend’s activities.”
Rasmus Kjaergaard
“The key message I wanted to send to the audience of global leaders in this space was that if we enhance the way we detect gambling behavior, it gives us quite a few benefits around a much more accurate detection of gambling behavior, but also gives the ability to communicate with the player at the risk level the player is at.
“I think it’s very important that we meet and share experience across different stakeholders, including experience in mitigating and fighting at-risk and problem gambling, because sharing that experience is crucial for all of us, to enhance what we do, to get new inputs, and to learn from each other.
“That’s also part of why I’m here; to share, learn, and collaborate with other stakeholders.
“I think this event has been a great start, as it looks to be a very nice initiative to start a globally-driven conversation from the highest place, G7, into forming policies and sharing experience around at-risk and problem gambling, and player protection processes to mitigate it.”
