Royal Victoria Hospital: Major incident at Belfast A&E

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-25664076

Royal Victoria Hospital: Major incident at Belfast A&E

A major incident was declared at Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital on Wednesday due to a large backlog of patients at the A&E department.

The hospital said additional staff had to be called in and extra beds opened to relieve pressure on the unit.

At one stage, 42 people were waiting on trolleys and staff described the situation as "horrendous".

The Belfast Trust said the situation was brought under control just before midnight.

At about 20:00 GMT, trolleys from the emergency department were backed up into the x-ray area.

As a result, some A&E patients were placed in the recovery area and fracture clinic. The day procedure unit was also re-opened.

Staff at the hospital told the BBC that if a major trauma had been brought into the hospital on Wednesday night, there was neither space nor staff to cope with it.

(continued, wait long enough and the outlier will happen...)

[pErvinalia]

This is standard at a lot of hospitals now. It's what happens when society doesn't fund health properly.

[klr]

Point of order: That's not an incident, it's a situation.

[Audley Strange]

Fuckers finally sober up and need a sickline?

[Svartalf]

The troubles are back?

[JimC]

Emergency departments in Melbourne tend to be clogged up with drunken hoons of an evening...

I'd put a tax on breweries which goes straight to fund bigger emergency departments in all hospitals.

(not distilleries, of course...)

[MrJonno]

14% of all emergency admittance is alcohol related in the UK but I'm prepared to bet its far far higher at the weekend

http://www.nursingtimes.net/nursing-pra ... 05.article

[pErvinalia]

Gotta be careful about media hysteria...

Alcohol-related violence: numbers don't always tally with media attention

...

But reading the recent coverage, you would be forgiven for thinking that alcohol-related assaults are becoming more common.

Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research statistics show the rate of alcohol-related assaults in New South Wales has been declining since 2008 and is the lowest since 2002, with 184.8 assaults per 100,000 people per year. It is however, still higher than the lowest point in 2000 of 136.6 assaults per 100,000.

....

Since not all assaults are reported to police (only about 57.4% are reported in NSW, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics), it's worth looking at another source.

NSW Health maintains a dataset that shows the rate of hospitalisation due to interpersonal violence. It doesn't show those where alcohol is a factor, but it shows the overall assault trend.

The most recent figures are an all-time low. The NSW Health data is segmented by gender and age, so we can check if there's a different trend for younger males.

Again, for males aged 15 to 44, the most recent figures show an all-time low.

........

It's also possible the severity of assaults is worsening, as Don Weatherburn, the director of the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research points out in the Sydney Morning Herald. He writes that the only way to check this is to examine records of people admitted to emergency with assault-related injuries. Weatherburn says his department is looking to undertake research into this early this year.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablo ... ?CMP=fb_gu