Drunkards belong in drunk tanks, not A&E

NATIONAL health Service. More like the ‘national hangover service’, as Gautam Das, a retired consultant urologist, dubbed it this week.

he was speaking out about the pressure drunks place on the emergency services. The cost to the NhS of treating alcohol abuse is about £2.7 billion a year — or £90 from every taxpayer. One has only to stand in A&e on a Friday or Saturday evening to see the extent of the problem.

Indeed, a further £1 billion a year is spent on ambulances and A&e services to look after drunks. Other figures released this week showed that there was an increase in alcohol-related hospital admissions by nearly a quarter in the past decade.

It would be easy to blame giddy youngsters, but actually all too often it’s otherwise respectable, sensible people in their 30s, 40s and even 50s.

The scale of the problem is hard to imagine unless you’ve seen it yourself. I remember one night shift in A&e when a woman in her 30s who’d just been sick started screaming at one of the nurses to clean it up. Meanwhile her friend, who’d just woken up, was complaining that he’d been waiting for more than an hour to see a doctor. he started shouting about where his shoe was, which, judging by the dirt on his foot, he’d lost some time ago.

It was pandemonium. I counted 16 patients whose sole reason for being there was alcohol. Not because they’d been drunk and fallen over and hit their head, but 16 people for whom the only reason they were in a cubicle in A&e was that they were inebriated.

To add insult to injury, most of them had been picked up by ambulance. They had intravenous fluids pushed through their veins over several hours to sober them up, so there was a three-hour wait in reception because they were taking up cubicles.

The whole scene was thrown into sharp relief by the woman in the end cubicle who was having a miscarriage.

Of course people get tipsy, and inevitably sometimes overdo it and end up in hospital. Fair enough. But it’s happening to so many people that services which are already at breaking point are being stretched even further.

As I stood in A&e that night, the smell of cider being gently wafted around the department by an electrical fan, I overheard the nurse telling two women they were now ready to go. ‘Just wait till I tell everyone at work on Monday about this,’ said one to her friend, and they burst out laughing. People just don’t care.

The only solution is to install ‘ drunk tanks’ in all major cities and towns where they can sit and sober up. And they should be made to pay for them — a £20 fine, say, for using the facility. Perhaps that will sober them up a bit, too.