http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-12428765

How do you determine if someone is injured directly as a result of consuming alcohol or just coincidently?

Personally, I’d have far more sympathy if they were talking about charging people who had conditions wholly as a result of long term abuse of alcohol, food, drugs or whatever. Even that’s very difficult though – you’d end up means testing every porker who turned up with a heart attack or stroke to decide what to charge them.

Can of worms for sure.

I guess the distinction is charging folk who intentionally get wasted & cause trouble, rather than those with addictions or weight problems.

Seems fairer to me.

Is the problem not that drunk people often waste time through being difficult to treat and abusive. Rather than there being a case against people who have injuries relating to being drunk.

I’m not sure which this article is in reference too (or both?)

IIRC one of mrs rkk01’s former employers (may even be current one) does not recognise sports injuries as a valid reason for sick leave…

if people are abusing staff, they should be charged as in criminally charged, not financially, that’s a back door to the destruction of the nhs as we know it just now…

They should bring in a muppets in A&E law.

I’d be happy to let a magistrate decide on viewing the CCTV + breathalyser evidence.

No one thinks that it is OK to get drunk enough to crash a car and cause damage, so why is it OK to get drunk enough to cause damage to the NHS?

If people haven’t got enough personal responsibility to know their limits, then when they start to have a -ve impact on other people I think it would be a good idea to take some proportionate action.

From the SPA website…

About Us
The Scotland Patients Association is an independent self-funding association which is there to help and support all patients in Scotland who need and request our help. It is a privilege to work on behalf of patients, especially when they come to us, often at their most vulnerable, very tired, weary and feeling powerless to cope. Many issues, simple and complex, arise out of contact with the NHS, the Private sector or the Local Authorities. We will consider all cases with the utmost confidentiality and try our best to express the feelings of the patients and what concerns them.

We will be pleased to work with the NHS, the Scottish Executive, the media, all other patient orientated organisations and charities, in fact anyone in order to improve the quality of life of patients. When patients are ill they need a service or understanding with the minimum of delay.

i.e. a couple/few folk who have “issues” and want to make themselves seem important. So – not from any health board or anyone associated with one.

Why do the media pick up on these self-proclaimed moral guardians and give them the oxygen of publicity which they so desperately seek?

I thought that was the whole point of tax! demerit goods etc!
Anyway thats enough of the econimics.

To be fair if your drunk and end up in hospital chances are you didn’t do it sober

Same with Fat people they don’t end up needing a gastric bands etc because they didn’t eat

but yet they won’t get charged for that

It’s a nice sound bite but won’t work in practice.
Where do you draw the line?

I totally support the idea of charging drunks to get A and E treatment and have advocated this in the past!

Drunks should also have to wait ina dryon out room until they are sober before getting treatment(if their condition isn’t life threatening). They should be charged for this too.

Also, the people who are under the influence, but not drunk should go to the back of the queue until all the sober people have been treated.

You think that’s harsh? Nonsense! Becoming blind drunk and then getting injured is a clear case of irresponsibe behaviour that society should not have to tolerate or bear the cost of!!

A sober, but seriously ill woman was featured on the news recently. She died waiting patiently for 10 hours because of the number of drunks in her A&E.

I sometimes listen to paramedics who are sick and tired of clearing up the carnage caused by thoughtless idiots who waste everybodies time and public money, week after week. The Police would concur as would the A&E staff who are routinely abused.

I say make the drunks pay!! People who can’t temper their behaviour should have to suffer the consequences and no support staff should have to put up with the abuse.

People who can’t temper their behaviour should have to suffer the consequences

So you’d apply the “it’s their own fault, charge ’em” rule to someone who rode their bike to fast down a hill then too?

the problem is that a large amount of people who turn up at a&e are sufferning from what might be judged ‘self inflicted’ injuries – whether they fell off a ladder trying to adjust a tv aerial or drove their car too fast and hit a tree why is it just alcohol that’s being targeted?

Also, how much should they be charged – full cost of treament, a token tenner?

re: abuse of staff, agree – no-one who does that should be treated unless the abuse is a result of a medical condition but that’s not a reason to charge people money, it’s a reason to use the law against them.

I definitely think fatties and smokers should be charged extra

I have no problem with people who are injured through drinking. I accept that getting drunk and fighting is normal for some people, and even if they are knobs they still pay taxes and still need stitching up. My issue is with the patients who are just drunk. No other symptoms. Being drunk is not a medical emergency, yet hundreds of A&E beds are blocked by people who are just to drunk to look after themselves. These people should be charged.

Spongebob – Member

A sober, but seriously ill woman was featured on the news recently. She died waiting patiently for 10 hours because of the number of drunks in her A&E.I assume that the medical staff were doing their job correctly and prioritising the most urgent cases, in which case the relative sobriety of the patients is irrelevant.

Spongebob… I might have to take umbrage with you on your view there.

So what you are saying is that my wife, who’d had a couple of glasses of wine the night she broke her leg, should’ve been told to wait in a drying out room until all the sober people had been seen? With no treatment? Maybe you’d like to save the morphine for a more deserving sober person.

In your view, should I have had to have driven her to A&E as well so that I didn’t use up a valuable sober-person ambulance? I’m sure her leg would have been in far better shape because of that than having a paramedic splint it and then trolley her to the ambulance. After all, it was only a single break in the tibia, and the fibula was only in four pieces. And yes, I guess I could have splinted it myself in two of the periods she was unresponsive whilst waiting for the blue lights. Maybe she should have been denied the metal pin that now runs from her knee to her ankle, saving it for a sober person?

As it happens, I trust A&E staff to triage properly and abide by the oath they took. Yes, they deserve not to be abused and if I was there when they were, I would step in, but _they_ can’t punish injured people for being drunk.

Can’t we just privatise the NHS? That way the lower orders who, lets be honest, are the ones who are fat, smerk tabs, drink too much and get into fights, are effectively barred from the system by financial constraints

Oh…. hang on a minute…?

+1 binners.
Bringing charges for this will be a slippery slope…..to privatisation.
It cannot be allowed to happen.
I am a nurse, not in A&E, the NHS has to stay free at point of entry.
And anyway we all pay taxes and NI? To fund the NHS.
This government are crminals!

what about your nan who has a glass of sherry and topples over.

drawing a line causes much grief of where to draw it.

Also, the people who are under the influence, but not drunk should go to the back of the queue until all the sober people have been treated.

I had 2 pints of cider and walked off a 7ft split level car park wall in the dark on the way home, made a right mess of my face. Should I have been denied treatment?

How about if I had exactly the same injury riding arround Swinley?

Both accidental, both from situations I put myself in and TBH I’d say the two pints of cider is the more sensible of the two activities!

Do you consider yourself drunk and incapable after 2 pints of cider?

wwaswas

So you’d apply the “it’s their own fault, charge ’em” rule to someone who rode their bike to fast down a hill then too?

He didn’t say that did he?

However, the point you are missing is that it isn’t careless mountain bikers who are clogging up A&E every Friday and Saturday and being abusive to the staff is it?

The reason that this sort of idea keeps coming up is because it is a widespread problem.

If it was the odd drunk occasionally falling off a kerb and banging his head I don’t suppose anyone would be too bothered. But it’s not, it’s lots of people, every week, not just injuring themselves, but also becoming out of control and causing bother.

Teh carnage in A+E on a friday night is only part of the story…. it’s also the sheer number of (younger and younger, ime) patients dying slow and horrible deaths as the result of long-term alcohol abuse.

A sobering sight – literally. 🙁

rightplaceright time – there’s two issues here;

1) shoudl the NHS be free at point of use for all

and

2) should a&e turn into a war zone at the weekends.

making people pay would have no effect on 2) – by definition the sort of people who are too drunk to control themselves wwon’t care if they’re ghoing to be asked to pay or not.

So, we’re left with adequate policing of a&e facilities (ie. enforcing the law) as being the solution to the problem of abuse of staff etc. This could be done without recourse to charging users of the service.

I doubt very much that charging at point of delivery will ever happen, think about it, how is that going to work? This is just pie in the sky bollocks from the Scottish Patients Society and is totally meaningless.

Do you consider yourself drunk and incapable after 2 pints of cider?

No, but I’d probably have failed a breathalyser test to drive a car.

How do you differentiate between;

Had an accident whilst drunk
Had an accident because of being drunk

?

2) should a&e turn into a war zone at the weekends.

making people pay would have no effect on 2) – by definition the sort of people who are too drunk to control themselves wwon’t care if they’re ghoing to be asked to pay or not.

Actually I do see a point there and also in what instant hit said. I agree that the NHS should be free at the point of entry and maybe I didn’t make my point clearly:

What was in my mind was not charging for treatment, but fining for antisocial behaviour, which would be like any other kind of fine – e.g. the sort of fine you might get for being drunk in charge of a vehicle.

Ms Watt said: “Anyone who has been abusing alcohol and can’t stand on their feet and is admitted to hospital at the weekend should pay towards their treatment.

So lets stay away from 2 glasses or wine of cider analogies 🙂

Would be bad news for those who can’t hold their drink.

A tax on the lightweight, in effect.

Wouldn’t affect me of course.

Wouldn’t affect me of course.

As I approach 45 and after years of sleep deprivation from a young family I find 2 pints of beer or half a bottle of wine has a far bigger effect than I would have thought possible when I was 25…

Cheap and easy, but I’m surprised no one’s raised it already: (edit: bar the OP in his title and now FM below)

Personal choice raises risk of injury, with guaranteeable statistical results.

“… why is it OK to get drunk rad enough to cause damage to the NHS?

If people haven’t got enough personal responsibility to know their limits, then when they start to have a -ve impact on other people I think it would be a good idea to take some proportionate action.”

Right on. Fall off your bike: you pay. Take a choice that raises your risk: you pay.

You think that’s harsh? Nonsense! Becoming blind drunk and then getting injured is a clear case of irresponsibe behaviour that society should not have to tolerate or bear the cost of!!

You think that’s harsh? Nonsense! Falling off your bike whilst riding furiously downhill and getting injured is a clear case of irresponsibe behaviour that society should not have to tolerate or bear the cost of!!

Where do you draw the line?

It’s often held up that at least cyclists are staying fit and are unlikely to be (as) obese, thereby reducing the impact only the NHS in the longer term.

That argument (probably) swings the other way for more extreme forms of cycling.

You think that’s harsh? Nonsense! Falling off your bike whilst riding furiously downhill and getting injured is a clear case of irresponsibe behaviour that society should not have to tolerate or bear the cost of!!

Where do you draw the line?

I would imagine by analysing how much the burden of cost was to the NHS in each example and maybe by comparing that to the cost of administering such a scheme.
NHS already charges for motor vehicle accidents.

any of you advocating leaving ‘drunks’ lying in a room ever actually assessed one? to rule out say, a head injury? or for that matter, read (seeing it’s scotland) the sign guidelines on looking after a person with a head injury? and that’s before they get ‘entertaining’!

as for getting people charged for their antisocial behaviour. presumably you’d be cool with staff getting paid to go to court for starters?

I would imagine by analysing how much the burden of cost was to the NHS in each example and maybe by comparing that to the cost of administering such a scheme.

So private medical insurance, then? Or just PAYIY?

Maybe there should be someone to assess blame at every hospital to see who should pay and who gets free treatment.

So private medical insurance, then?

Why?
You don’t need insurance if you are charged for other services or fined for abusing services.

Very difficult can of worms. Unfortunately drinking has become a national sport and it’s not just injury that’s the problem – the people who drink themselves into a stupour (sp?) and need close attention so they don’t choke on their own vomit, then come round and are violent/abusive are the real problems, not those who fall and break an ankle or have a bit of a barny and get a small cut.

I’m addicted to getting drunk on the weekend then trying to hospitalise other drunks. So far are I’m winning 34-7. 8)

have to suffer the consequences…

Seems a bit harsh, once you get use to the lolcats they’re really very good company.

I don’t mind the people who have a few drinks and then fall over, trip up or otherwise injure themselves, they tend to be reasonably pleasant and usually apologetic for “wasting my time” (which they aren’t). The two groups of patients that tend to get on my wick are the ones who are in A&E for no other reason than they are drunk (a fair number of people on a Thursday – Sunday night) and just need a place to lie down/be sick/spit all over/shit themselves in while we keep an eye on them until they sober up and the group who go out, get drunk, have a fight and then come to A&E and give the staff grief.

For the first group: I am not your mother/best mate. This is their job, not mine.

For the second group: Don’t blame me coz you are a scrote who goes out to get drunk and have a fight and foolishly chooses the same night as everyone else, if you do this it WILL be busy and you WILL have to wait. And no, “paying my wages” does not give you the right to be seen immediately or swear at me.

Charge the first group, arrest the second. Simple.