Stay-at-home drinkers clog hospital

It’s a familiar stereotype: the partygoer who heads into town, gets drunk, comes a cropper and ends up in an emergency department as an entirely avoidable health statistic.

It happens every weekend across the country and is considered an unnecessary drain on the system.

It is, but it turns out the stayat-home version of that problem drinker may be an even bigger issue.

Researchers at the University of Otago studied alcoholrelated attendances at Christchurch Hospital emergency department (ED) for a three-week period in 2013 and again last year and found most people had taken their last drink at home: just under 70 per cent in both cases.

Only 26 per cent of patients in the 2013 study had drunk most recently at a pub or club, and that dropped to 20 per cent in 2017.

The results of the most recent study were published in the New Zealand Medical Journal. Researchers were primarily looking for any effects of a 2012 law change designed to reduce alcohol-related harm. The onlicence/off-licence disparity came as something of a surprise.

‘‘Before I started doing this work I probably had a similar perception to what I think many people would have, which is that alcohol-related harm comes about from people stumbling out of bars at two in the morning and falling over or getting into fights,’’ study supervisor Dr James Foulds said.

‘‘What our data clearly shows is that is not the case for the majority of people who wind up in ED. [Most] have purchased their alcohol from off-licence venues, mainly liquor stores and to a lesser extent supermarkets, and they’ve had their last drink at a private location.’’

The Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012 gave local authorities the power to adopt their own local alcohol policies (LAPs). The researchers were hoping to measure the impact of a Christchurch iteration, but the city council scrapped its first effort in 2017 after spending five years and $1 million on it. A fresh process is under way.

Most people in the study bought their alcohol from offlicence venues. Controls around such sales should be a top priority in any policy, Foulds said.

‘‘Regulatory authorities need to look at . . . how they licence particularly new off-licence outlets.’’

Council efforts to implement LAPs around the country have met resistance from the hospitality industry, both on and offlicence outlets.

‘‘Regulatory authorities need to look at . . . how they licence particularly new off-licence outlets.’’