Nurses Bid To Shame Abusive Drunks With Poster Facts

Nurses frustrated with abuse from drunken patients have pinned up posters in hospital waiting rooms in Angus showing the growing number of alcohol-related admissions.

Medics at the county’s four minor-injury units are having to deal with more and more people turning up with serious injuries caused by drunken falls or alcohol-fuelled fights.

As well as taking up hours of treatment time, some of the patients have subjected doctors and nurses to verbal abuse – and sometimes physical assaults. Staff at the units in Arbroath, Forfar, Brechin and Montrose have now put up large posters in waiting areas showing how admissions were related to alcohol.

Nurses update the figures on the posters each month, in the hope it will raise awareness among patients about the impact of alcohol on people’s lives and the cost to the NHS in time and money. Figures show 49 people were treated last month for alcohol-related injuries in Arbroath alone.

While many of the accidents occur after nights out in pubs, the majority happen when people have been drinking at home. Common injuries include burns to hands while cooking, falls down stairs, serious head injuries caused by drunken fights and broken bones from domestic violence incidents.

The poster scheme has been led by Focus on Alcohol Angus, an action group that works in partnership with the local emergency services, council and other organisations. Project manager Eileen McArthur said the posters were a simple way to get a serious message across.

“We want to raise awareness and make people stop and think about the impact of alcohol on their own behaviour, their families and on the wider community,” she said. “(The figures) are something we have not shared with the public before and we hope it will be effective.”

Ms McArthur added that alcohol-fuelled abuse towards staff was most common at Arbroath Infirmary. She said: “In the main, it’s verbal aggression but there has been a number of physical attacks on doctors and nurses, particularly in Arbroath. Given the high level of deprivation there, alcohol use is generally high.”

Ms McArthur added that a wide range of people were admitted through drink-related incidents. “Staff are at the coal face – they can see the whole range of the effects of alcohol, such as where it had led to domestic abuse,” she said. “And a lot of older people don’t realise they cannot mix alcohol with medication.”

Plans are also under way to place posters in the police custody suite in Arbroath, showing how many people detained each month had been drinking before arrest. The poster scheme has been welcomed by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and voluntary organisation Alcohol Focus Scotland (AFS), which both said they had not heard of the initiative being used in other areas.

RCN director Theresa Fyffe said: “We welcome innovative ways of raising public awareness of the consequences of misusing alcohol. This example demonstrates the sort of measures that can be taken to help influence people when they are already thinking about their health.”

Jack Law, chief executive of AFS, added: “With alcohol misuse placing a growing strain on the NHS, this is a really positive awareness-raising initiative in Angus. Drunk patients are particularly difficult to deal with and may become aggressive and violent, affecting staff and other patients.”

The Scottish Executive has estimated alcohol misuse costs the NHS more than £110million a year, with almost 200,000 people attending accident and emergency units as a result each year. The wider cost of alcohol abuse to social work, police and other agencies has been put at £1.1billion.