Two thirds of weekend ambulance calls alcohol related

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The burden that alcohol and binge drinking is putting on frontline NHS staff can be revealed today.

The growing binge-drinking culture means thousands of pounds are being wasted in treating people who are too drunk to get home, or have been in fights or hurt themselves while drunk.

Paramedics have to check them and take them to hospital, where doctors have complained they take up beds and waste medical staff 's time.

London Ambulance Service bosses say about 100,000 calls a year - costing at least £18.6 million - are recorded as being due to alcohol. But because alcohol is not always noted as being a factor in emergency calls, the true number could be double or treble that.

The most shocking example in recent months was a drunken City worker in his twenties who fell asleep in a Tube tunnel and was run over. The train almost severed his right ankle, broke his right leg and hand and burned both hands.

Stuart Shelley, the emergency medical technician who treated the man, said: "He had been out drinking and couldn't remember anything."

The Standard tracked six paramedic crews covering 13 weekend nights over the past month and found that out of a total of 62 calls, 40 were alcohol-related.

During a typical Friday night we saw two men lying in the street comatose.

After checks were carried out, they were found merely to be drunk. One, a 30-yearold hospital porter, got into the ambulance and asked for a pillow and said he just needed to sleep it off - but he had to be taken to hospital.

The other, a 23-year-old Italian, was so drunk he did not respond when lights were shone into his eyes.

He and two friends had drunk a bottle of rum between them. At the hospital one of the friends vomited in the corridor and had to be admitted as well.

Emergency medical technician Jenny Duvergier, 25, said most drunks did not need an ambulance. She said: "No one is willing to take responsibility for them.

"The police won't take them and we would keep getting calls about them if we left them on the street. Usually we get five or six calls like that a night. Then at around 6am they start again when people are found asleep in gardens."

One accident and emergency doctor at University College Hospital said his department saw up to 20 people a night who just needed to sleep it off, and another 20 or so who had hurt themselves drinking or had been in fights.

Peter Bradley, chief executive of the LAS, is also the Government's key adviser on ambulance issues. He said: "Every one of my staff who has been in the job more than six months will have been abused either physically or verbally because of alcohol.

"Alcohol is the single biggest problem for us - drugs is a very minor thing in comparison. We have been under-recording it. We write down the illness and not always the cause."

Mr Bradley added: "We need to make getting falling-over drunk a lot less glamorous - we have succeeded in making drink driving anti-social."

He said licensees should take more responsibility, and he called for an end to cheap promotions that encourage binge drinking.

 

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