£42k per Visit For Rapist’s Renal Treatment

When Donald Gibson enters the renal unit at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary he is flanked by two security guards who watch his every move. It should be a typical hospital scene of patients preparing for a gruelling three-hour dialysis session.

Instead, the presence of this man brings fear and chaos to the ward, transforming it into a virtual prison cell, complete with CCTV cameras and panic buttons for the terrified nurses. The convicted rapist attends a specially built secure unit at the ERI three times a week for life-saving kidney treatment.

Dubbed “Hannibal”, after the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs, Gibson, from Edinburgh, was jailed for eight years in 1989 for subjecting a young teacher to a terrifying 12-hour sex ordeal. He was then jailed for nine months last year for assaulting a nurse and racially abusing staff.

Yesterday, it emerged hospital bosses have spent a staggering £42,000 on security measures to keep him in check. Only six of the 37 dialysis nurses are prepared to go anywhere near him after he threatened to kill one of their colleagues.

Gibson’s is not an isolated case. The revelations come amid reports that the annual cost to NHS Scotland of dealing with violent and abusive patients is £3 million. An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme found the money was being spent on personal alarms for staff, training to deal with belligerent patients, absenteeism and the spiralling legal costs of pursuing offenders through the courts. The documentary also revealed that more than 12,500 cases of abuse in Scotland’s hospitals were reported last year.

David Bolton, NHS Lothian’s university hospitals chief operating officer, said the annual cost of dealing with Gibson was equivalent to paying for three nurses. He said: “I guess when you add it all up…you are looking at maybe the cost of three recently qualified nurses working for a year in our hospitals. That’s the sort of money we are talking about here.”

Hospital sources said they were forced to treat 37-year-old Gibson with “kid gloves” because he had threatened to take legal action for alleged victimisation. “We have a duty of care to treat him because this is a life-and-death situation. There is nothing we can do about it.”

The case is mirrored across the UK, with violent and abusive patients costing the NHS more than £100 million a year. An estimated 75,000 staff were attacked last year, and the BBC documentary exposed examples of abuse at hospitals in Edinburgh and Birmingham.

The programme contacted health authorities to assess how much was being spent on extra security and found the cost was equivalent to the salaries of 4,500 nurses, or more than 800,000 paramedic call-outs.

Anne Thomson, the acting deputy director of the Royal College of Nursing Scotland, said abuse against her members was commonplace. “I think with increasing drug and alcohol use it certainly feels that there’s less respect generally for professionals in a health-care setting. We are having increased reports of it.”

However, despite the government’s zero tolerance policy, fewer than 2 per cent of attacks result in prosecutions and much of the abuse goes unreported.

Amai Gold, a nurse who was left permanently disabled after a patient stabbed her with a needle, told the programme how she had her case dropped after a two-and-a-half-year struggle to get it to court.