LONDON -- By Friday, hard-drinking Britons had recovered from Christmas -- a crucial leg in the holiday party season -- and were ready for one of the booziest nights of the year: New Year's Eve.
Then came a stern warning from the chief of the National Health Service.
"NHS doesn't stand for 'National Hangover Service,'" said Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England.
Stevens described people whose excessive consumption was placing added pressure on the already strained health service as "selfish" and said his organization was looking to expand the use of portable alcohol intoxication management services -- more commonly known as drunk tanks.
His assessment came after spending time before Christmas with ambulance crews on night shifts in London, witnessing firsthand the frequency with which accident and emergency services -- known in Britain by the shorthand A&E -- were called upon to deal with drunk and aggressive people.
"When the health service is pulling out all the stops to care for sick and vulnerable patients who rightly and genuinely need our support," Stevens said, "it's frankly selfish when ambulance paramedics and A&E nurses have to be diverted to looking after revelers who have overindulged" and who just needed somewhere to safely sleep it off.
Stevens urged the public to take a more responsible and restrained approach to the health service, particularly over the New Year's weekend. The health service has reported a huge increase in the number of people referred to emergency rooms in the first two hours of the new year because of excessive alcohol consumption.
Britain has one of the highest levels of alcohol misuse in the world. During the year, approximately 15 percent of people who seek treatment at emergency rooms do so in response to alcohol consumption, the health service said. That peaks on Friday and Saturday evenings, especially during the holiday season, when as many as 70 percent of the patients are there for alcohol-related matters.
To ease some of the strain on emergency services during this time of the year, the health service is looking to roll out more supervised units equipped with beds, showers, drips and rehydration. The units are being used in cities like Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester and Newcastle, and if they succeed in reducing pressure on emergency services this year, the health service will scale up their use in other major cities in 2018.
Researchers at Cardiff University, who are studying the effectiveness of the units in managing intoxicated patients, have found evidence that they had helped cut the number of attacks on health-service employees by 40 percent.
Simon Moore, a professor at Cardiff University, said the research suggested that people were referring intoxicated friends and family members to the hospital rather than risk injury when dealing with someone who was drunk and disorderly.
Health service employees say there is a need for more education about the consequences of binge drinking, as well as on how to address the problem without calling on emergency services.
"Many of the referrals related to excessive alcohol consumption take place because people tend to panic and don't know what steps to take," said Lisa Hobbs, a paramedic who worked for the Guy's and St. Thomas' hospitals in London on New Year's Eve last year. "In many cases the situation can be handled by taking the patient home, hydrating them and allowing them to just sleep it off."
Another reason for the rise in patients, Hobbs said, was that alcohol consumption led to increased aggression, and that in turn could lead to fights in which they were injured.
"The only real solution to prevent that is for people to drink less," she said.
A Section on 12/30/2017