SUBSTANCE ABUSE:SUBSTANCES SOLD in head shops hrtr may kill more people than did swine flu, a consultant in emergency medicine has warned.
Dr Chris Luke, who is based in Cork, said head shops had the potential to be a catastrophe.
“I’m far more worried about them than I was about swine flu because anecdotally I’m hearing of two or three patients a week being seen in most emergency departments as a result of taking head shop products and the presentations are really scary,” he said.
They may “lead to far more deaths than the 24 or so we saw with swine flu,” he added.
The drugs which head shops sold, he said, seemed to be displacing the consumption of cocaine and other drugs.
Dr Luke also told delegates at the annual conference of the Irish Medical Organisation on Saturday that the trolley problem in hospital emergency departments had not gone away but there were “lots of ludicrous instances of people on trolleys that should not be there”.
He had seen boys with minor injuries on trolleys playing Nintendos.
“The trolley problem is as much about how we deal with patients,” he added, pointing out that some people were kept in on a trolley because they couldn’t get an MRI scan as an outpatient. These were patients who could go home and come back the following day.
“I’m forever telling staff not to put them on a trolley in the first place,” he added.
Dr Luke said if each ward in the hospital took in one extra patient, the trolley problem could be resolved. Overcrowding in emergency departments was contributing to difficulties in recruiting staff and leading to up to 400 avoidable deaths a year.
Dr Hugh Bredin, a consultant urologist, said that during his early days as a consultant in Galway, there were patients down the middle of wards and on corridors and it took a long time to address this. He would not support its reintroduction.
Prof John Higgins, an obstetrician in Cork, said patients and the public, particularly elderly people, were terrified of trolleys and were genuinely afraid of going into hospital emergency departments.
Dr Trevor Duffy, chairman of the IMO’s consultant committee, urged Minister for Health Mary Harney to be honest in acknowledging that overcrowding in emergency departments continued to persist.
Prof Cillian Twomey, a Cork-based consultant geriatrician, said the introduction of the so-called Fair Deal scheme for funding nursing home care had delayed rather than speeded up the discharge of older people from acute hospital beds to more appropriate long-term care facilities. Older people were now waiting months to get into vacant long-term care beds as a result of the scheme.
Prof Twomey said the application process for what he preferred to call the nursing home support scheme – because he did not believe it to be fair – was complex.
Forty per cent of the people expected to apply for it did not have the cognitive ability to understand the application form, yet some hospitals were now threatening to charge older people €1,500 a week if they failed to complete the application form, which was unfair and wrong.
“The working of this scheme has to be revised,” he said. “I’ve had patients in the acute sector who were waiting for two and three months when there was a public long-term care bed available . . . and I couldn’t move them because the paper work hadn’t been done.”