Martin to act on A&E unit drunks

ACTION will be taken to reduce the number of drunks ending up in accident and emergency units, health minister Micheál Martin said yesterday.

An umbrella group for Dublin's five main hospitals is currently taking legal advice on billing parents for treating their binge drinking teenagers.

Mr Martin did not believe there should be any distinction between adults and children coming into casualty drunk.

He had no difficulty however, with the proposal by the Acute Hospitals Committee of the Eastern Regional Health Authority (ERHA) to introduce a new charge for treating patients who come in drunk.

"If it can be shown that additional charges for those who turn up drunk can act as a disincentive to that sort of behaviour then I will be in favour of that", Mr Martin said, before he addressed SIPTU's national nursing convention in Dublin.

He thought it best, however, to await the outcome of a national survey funded by his department which is currently examining the number of inebriated people who attend A&E in the major teaching hospitals.

Mr Martin said the numbers of drunks turning up in A&E was seriously inconveniencing hospital staff and upsetting other people awaiting treatment.

Very often, he said, patients and their families who arrived in A&E were in a hugely traumatic situation and it was unacceptable to have people wandering around drunk in the same unit.

Meanwhile, the clinical director of the Central Mental Hospital warned that the Criminal Insanity Bill must be amended to ensure that the treatment of prisoners with mental illness is brought into the 21st century.

Consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Harry Kennedy told the nurses' conference that no discussion or policy paper had been published before the bill had been introduced in the Senate.

The proposed legislation has been drawn up because of the need to bring Ireland's mental health law into line with the European Convention of Human Rights.

Dr Kennedy said the protection of the rights of patients in the area of criminal law had remained unchanged for almost 100 years.

Currently, there is no right of appeal for people who are found mentally unfit or insane and there were currently two legal definitions of mental disorder instead of one.

"The fear is that if it goes through in a deeply flawed form it will be challenged immediately and we will be back to where we started with nothing," he said.