Impact of 24-hourdrink lawsquestioned

CONTROVERSIAL changes allowing 24-hour drinking have had no dramatic impact on the numbers of people needing emergency hospital treatment, research in Yorkshire reveals.

Opponents of the relaxation in licensing laws in November 2005 say it has fuelled an increase in violence and anti-social behaviour.

Doctors found numbers of adult patients visiting casualty for help for problems linked directly to alcohol rose in Sheffield and Barnsley in the year after the change. But in Doncaster the number of attendances fell and in Rotherham they stayed the same.

Specialists from the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield found overall the number of patients attending A&E with alcohol-related ailments in the year after the law changed went up to nearly 4,400 across South Yorkshire.

Patients were aged between 18 and 93, with an average age of 34. Two-thirds were men and more than half were in Sheffield. The study looked only at those attending for problems linked directly to alcohol and excluded those who might have been injured because they were drunk.

The peak time for them to arrive for help overall remained at 1am, although in Doncaster it was an hour earlier at midnight after the law changed and in Rotherham it was 60 minutes earlier at 11pm. In Sheffield it was an hour later at 1am.

The authors of the study, published in the Emergency Medicine Journal, concluded trends showing variations in alcohol-related attendances across South Yorkshire following the new regulations reflected local factors “rather than any consistent impact” from licensing laws.

Alcohol misuse is estimated to cost the NHS up to 1.7bn a year. Estimates suggest as many as a third of the 14 million people who attend A&E units each year do so due to problems linked in some way to alcohol, with more than two-thirds of people requiring treatment after midnight doing so due to heavy drinking.