Some 80 per cent of staff in hospital Accident and Emergency departments have reported verbal abuse, 56 per cent said the verbal abuse was threatening and 18 per cent of nurses have reported significant sexual harassment while carrying out their job, the Dáil was told.
During a private members' debate Fine Gael's health spokesman Dr Liam Twomey called for double charges to be levied on drunk "problematic people who show up in A&E departments night after night".
Fine Gael called for separate "wet rooms" for drunks who did not need medical attention, more gardaí on duty in A&E units on weekend nights, and a new €200 on the spot fine for abusive behaviour.
But Minister for Health Mary Harney said that "it would be a mistake to expect short-term actions on alcohol abuse to solve wider problems". She said that tackling alcohol abuse would not improve rostering to ensure patients are seen, diagnosed, treated and discharged quickly.
The Minister added that consultants would have to change their working hours because patients often ended up staying in A&E overnight because there was no consultant on duty after 6pm until 8am or 9 am the following morning.
Ms Harney said that a "whole system" approach was necessary. "More of the same, even a lot more of the same will not work. More beds, more hospitals, more nurses, more consultants, more resources, more pay - on their own - are not the solution."
She added that "when the IMO and others rightly say we need a 'whole system' approach, this means whole system change and not just a wholly bigger system".
She agreed that it was totally unacceptable that frontline healthcare workers are subjected to threats or abuse and the Minister for Justice was preparing to introduce a fixed penalty fine for public order breaches and was considering a specific offence for assaults against emergency workers.
Dr Twomey said that alcohol consumption had increased by 40 per cent in the past 10 years and alcohol was contributing greatly to the A&E crisis.
"This is not the 'sociable few drinks on a weekend night' kind of alcohol consumption.
"This is where alcohol leads to violence, aggression and abuse, terrifying staff and other patients - especially children and the elderly and leaving the individual semi-comatose and the taxpayer with a €600 million bill."
He said that Government speakers would claim such "wet rooms" as a retrograde step and perhaps even that they were medically unsound. But "properly planned, properly manned and properly medically supervised" rooms would work.
Olivia Mitchell (FG, Dublin South) said "that footless, mindless, recidivist drunks" were a completely unnecessary and unacceptable addition to the cocktail of problems in A&E.
"It is one thing to join the police, prisons or Defence Forces and expect to face violence and intimidation, but if one enters the caring professions it is a completely different situation."
