A night of drunken shame on scotland's emergency frontline

Published on Monday 25 May 2009 10:11

ALCOHOL-RELATED incidents are estimated to cost the Scottish Ambulance service £31.5 million a year, but this may well be an underestimate. The statistic is sobering – but the hard reality is even stronger.

A night with Scotland's paramedics runs from the nice housing "estates" to the "schemes", all to deal with over-imbibers. In the debate on how to address Scotland's battle with booze, the ambulance service, the frontline in that battle, is too often overlooked.

We hear reports of drunks kicking off in police cells and A&E departments and assaulting police officers and nursing staff, but what about the ambulance staff who are often first on the scene?

A female paramedic and constituent of mine had her nose broken by a drunken thug. NHS staff surveys report that nearly 30 per cent of staff have been recipients of violent or aggressive behaviour.

Dealing with alcohol is at the heart of a paramedic's Friday or Saturday night. After ten hours on shift with the ambulance service in West Lothian, I had not seen a patient who was suffering from ill-health, injury or accident – only those who were suffering as a result of alcohol consumption.

The first call of the night was to a house where an adult male, after a day of football and drinking, had "fallen" and cut his head. There was a partner and children at home and the atmosphere was tense. The children were crying because Dad was hurt and Mum was upset. The man was stupefied yet had to be cajoled to leave his bottle of Beck's behind as he took his last swig before getting into the ambulance.

Then there was the young man who had been slashed in the pub – quite badly across the face. It was a pretty intimidating atmosphere to go into. There were hordes of people, many of them very drunk, and it made it difficult for the crew to get on with their job. They really need police protection at times.

Shortly after that we had to go to a brawl at a family wedding. It wasn't too clear what had happened but it had all spilled out on to the street and there was a guy who was pretty badly hurt and a lot of upset and noise.

The most shocking moment, though, was still to come, when we got a call to a three-storey former council house in Livingston. Apparently, someone was out cold. We went up the stairs and found in one room a large group of young teenagers, all drunk, the place was packed with them.

On the bed was one who was lying still, but the crew ascertained more or less immediately there was nothing wrong with him, so we had to go straight to the next job. But on the way down the stairs out came one of their mums in a nightie, and she obviously saw me coming down her stairs with two folk in the full green jumpsuit. You'd think she'd wonder what was going on, who we were, why we were there, why there was a room full of teenagers drinking in one of her rooms. Nope – all she said was "hiya", then walked past. It was unbelievable.

Later, there was the chronic alcoholic who, admittedly, had long-standing health problems (as a result of a lifetime on the booze), and who waited until a busy Saturday night to complain of his ailments. He changed his mind about going to hospital after he established that there was a four-hour wait at A&E. This was despite reporting that his pain scored 7/10 in severity.

The tolerance of our paramedics for those who are only in need because they "need" a drink is impeccable.

I was stunned by the whole evening, and that's from someone who was a social worker before going into politics, but the ambulance crew treated it as a normal night. I detected a real stoicism among them, they have to respond to emergencies regardless of the circumstance or how intimidating it is or even the level of abuse they suffer. They're the last line.

What angers me the most is that everything we attended to that night was utterly avoidable, and we were going to jobs that could have prevented us attending a road accident or a heart attack.

The quid pro quo for the political classes is to grasp the nettle and be bold in dealing with the causes of alcohol abuse and to be radical in promoting prevention. We owe it to the staff who face the consequences on the frontline to be bold enough to take real action to tackle Scotland's booze culture.

Angela Constance is SNP MSP for Livingston.

Streets of Capital 'like a war zone'

ONE Edinburgh paramedic who has worked in the city for nearly a decade described the scenes he and his colleagues frequently face on weekends as like "a war zone".

The problems have grown worse in recent years, said the emergency worker, who wished to remain anonymous.

He said: "It can be like a war zone on Friday and Saturday nights, even Thursdays and Sundays can be quite bad.

"To be honest, the threat of abuse is actually much worse than what you actually get, but at times you feel like a clean-up force for the pubs and clubs.

"It's not real paramedic work at the end of the day.

"We all care deeply about our jobs and get a thrill from saving lives, but it's true, you regularly have nights at the weekend when all you do is care for drunks or people who have been the victims of drunks.

"It makes you despair sometimes but you have to do the work in front of you; we can't choose who is sick."

Alcohol to blame for almost every weekend call-out

ALMOST every incident which paramedics are called to on Friday and Saturday nights in the Lothians are now alcohol-related, ambulance chiefs warned today.

Binge drinkers are being blamed for the majority of the thousands of incidents every year which are tying up ambulance crews, delaying them from dealing with other emergencies.

As well as putting a strain on ambulance service resources, the situation means paramedics are facing more threats of violence and abuse. Attacks on emergency crews are reported on an almost weekly basis in the Lothians.

Livingston MSP Angela Constance, who has taken up the issue after a paramedic in her constituency had her nose broken when she was attacked on duty, spent a busy Saturday night shift with one paramedic team and didn't attend a single incident that was not alcohol-related.

Peter Connor, the chief of the ambulance service in the Lothians, said: "Alcohol-related incidents put a strain on services right across the Lothians.

"The weekends are worse, especially with acute drinkers, and these make up the vast majority of incidents on these nights.

"It's not just a case of managing the alcohol, it's about managing the behaviour that the abuse of alcohol causes, whether that is physical or verbal abuse of our staff.

"On a personal level it concerns me that the staff are exposed to this kind of thing.

"It has got worse over the years, the price (of alcohol] keeps coming down, pubs are open for longer hours and everyone knows culturally what is going on with alcohol."

The service has tried new strategies in Edinburgh in recent years in an effort to cope with the large number of call-outs.

Over the festive period, a mini "field hospital" was set up on the Royal Mile to treat intoxicated revellers, often simply acting as a place to let them sleep it off, rather than attend a busy casualty unit.

On an average weekend, the ambulance service attends around 500 call-outs in the Lothians, with avoidable drink-related incidents stretching limited resources.

Ms Constance, the SNP MP for Livingston, believes radical action is necessary.

She said: "I don't believe that any one individual, organisation or political party has all the answers but I do believe we need to be bold and radical. More education and better enforcement of licensing laws is fine, but it is not enough.

"Blunt measures such as minimum pricing work, in so much as a ten per cent price increase results in a corresponding decrease in consumption.

"For the sake of our children and our communities, we cannot continue to tolerate pocket money-priced booze."