Patients at Hawke's Bay Hospital's Emergency Department (ED) are missing out because of drunkenness, says emergency doctor Scott Boyes.
ED patients affected by alcohol lowered the standard of care for other patients because they required extra resources because of their higher risk complications or misdiagnosis, he said.
"One of the rules of thumb that we use in the emergency department is if they are high-risk patients we need to put adequate resources into them and be cautious when we approach them," he said.
People under the influence of alcohol lessened the timelines of other ED patients' treatment because of their high-risk status.
"We see that all the time. Studies have looked at people who have heart attacks - we measure the time it takes for people to get their medicine - and we know that when we have patients with trauma in the department that medicine is delayed. It is a common theme that high-risk patients and more trauma related issues really do have an impact on quality measures.