Drunk patients may face A&E charges

Patients who turn up drunk at accident and emergency departments could have to fork out extra for their treatment, Minister for Health Micheal Martin said today.

Micheal Martin said he was looking at ways of reducing the number of “hopelessly drunk” people wandering around casualty units.

He said he would consider a proposal put forward by the Eastern Regional Health Authority for a special new levy.

“If it can be shown that additional charges for those who turn up drunk can act as a disincentive to that kind of behaviour then I will be in favour of that,” Mr Martin said.

He added he had “no difficulty” with the EHRA considering such a proposal.

Health chiefs proposed charging parents extra when their drunken teenagers turned up at A&E departments.

They said that these patients were using a large amount of hospital resources and forcing genuinely sick people to wait longer.

Although Mr Martin said he would look at the idea, he said he did not want to distinguish between adults and children.

He also said that he would prefer to wait for the outcome of a survey he had funded, examining the patterns between alcohol and people attending A&E, before making any decisions.

“When we get feedback from that we should have a better understanding of the scale of drunkenness within A&E departments,” he told reporters in Dublin.

“Based on that evidence we will have to consider measures to reduce the pattern of people turning up hopelessly drunk in our A&E departments.”

The minister said drunk patients wandering around the wards were a “huge inconvenience to the staff” and to genuine patients.

He said the report would also look at how many accidents were caused by drunkenness and at ways to reduce this.