Last updated 11:36, Tuesday, 15 April 2008

The problem with being a civilised country is that it encourages uncivilised behaviour from morons like those who assault and abuse nurses and doctors usually in hospital casualty units.

Our problem is that we are too tolerant and we have no real deterrent or punishment for such people.

The logical outcome for someone who attacks a national health worker is for them to have their rights to national health treatment removed. But that is where civilisation gets in the way. If a banned patient turned up at a doctor’s surgery or an A&E department we know and, more to the point, they know that they would not be turned away.

In some places where persistent violent or abusive patients were banned from normal NHS points of contact as a way of protecting health workers special clinics were set up for the violent ones. The result being that they were fast tracked to medical services as a ‘punishment’ for beating up nurses. Now that’s ironic.

The major problem is that abuse and violence is usually the result of booze. Either the patient is drunk or their friends, who often become the most abusive and unreasonable, are also paralytic. Again civilisation steps in to be its own worst enemy.

Why do we treat being drunk and incapable on a weekend as an illness which requires the self-inflicted sufferer to be transported in an ambulance to vomit all over a hospital rather than in the gutter where they truly belong?

Our health service still holds a special place in our hearts as do the people who work in it. It is almost impossible for the majority of us to imagine what is in the minds, if they have one, of those who attack such people.

There should be a special category of offence for ‘heroes’ who attack nurses and part of their punishment should be having their pictures placed around their communities so ‘civilised’ people like me would know not to offer them a sip of water even if they were dying of thirst.