Alcohol related hospital admissions (FOI)

Request

Please provide the following information:

A

How many people attended the Accident and Emergency (A&E) department at Jersey's General Hospital due to excess alcohol consumption in the last year (September 2018 to September 2019)?

B

How many of the above were taken by ambulance?

C

How many of the above were under the age of 18?

D

What percentage of all A&E admissions in the above time period were related to alcohol consumption?

E

What is the procedure if someone arrives at A&E due to excess alcohol consumption?

F

What aftercare and / or information is offered to them?

Response

A

Emergency department attendances for patients consuming excess alcohol are classified under the following code: ‘Poisoning (including overdose) - other, including alcohol’.

It is important to note that this code is also used for other substances. Further breakdown of the figures would require a manual review of patient notes and has been estimated to exceed the time limit provisions under Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014.

The table below shows activity from 1 September 2018 to 31 August 2019.

 B

C

D

E

Patients are triaged on arrival by the nursing team and treated by the medical staff according to their category of illness. If excess alcohol is the sole reason for their attendance monitoring will be done and when required blood tests. Treatment will be dependant on their clinical condition from the range of monitoring and discharge from the department to admission and further care as an inpatient. Where excess alcohol has been diagnosed these patients are referred for follow up by the alcohol team

F

If referred to the Hospital Alcohol Liaison Team they are offered brief or extended interventions. This includes for example information and awareness of consequences of high-risk drinking including alcohol poisoning and advice on low risk or controlled drinking plus techniques to help avoid ending up in hospital again as a consequence of their drinking.

For those that are screened to be drinking at high risk or dependent levels, there is the offer of onward referral to the Community Alcohol Team. Here depending on the client’s wish, they may receive support in gradual reduction and controlling alcohol intake over a number of sessions, detoxification and relapse prevention support. The relapse prevention support can include engaging in our relapse prevention group, one-to-one support and/or prescription of medication to help control or avoid relapse. Some will be assessed for onward referral for residential rehabilitation.

For those under 18, a referral is made to the Young Persons Substance Misuse worker and depending on the nature of the problem offered brief information and advice or structured sessional work to help address problematic alcohol use.

Article applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.