Experimenting ruins events and long weekends

Young people are targeting long weekends and major events to experiment with drugs with increasingly catastrophic effects.

The Townsville Hospital emergency department sees about seven patients every day effects of drugs and alcohol with the average age of the person presenting 37 years old.

On 5 May, the date of music festival Groovin’ the Moo the average age of presentations dropped by a decade to 27 years of age from 61 presentations.

Emergency Department director Dr Luke Lawton said this similar age dips were seen during long weekends like over Australia Day.

“What we’ve known anecdotally for some time is that young people are most likely to experiment with drugs over long weekends and at events,” he said.

“This may be because they are more likely to be influenced by their friends or others, but it is an alarming trend.

“Festivals and long weekends should be fun and memorable for all the right reasons. Spending these days in hospital receiving emergency care is no one’s idea of a good time.”

Dr Lawton said long weekends and after big events were typically busy times for emergency departments notwithstanding increase in drug and alcohol presentations.

In April, Townsville Hospital’s emergency department saw 6897 people, an average of 250 presentations a day, up almost 30 a day from last year.

Dr Lawton said despite the sustained surge in demand since the beginning of 2019 Townsville Hospital’s emergency department remained among the best performed in Queensland. 

“It has been a year unlike any other for so many of us here in North Queensland and that is certainly the case here in our ED as well,” he said.

“Despite this incredible increase in demand for our services I couldn’t be prouder of the team here for maintaining the best performance for our patient off-stretcher time in all of Queensland and among the top few in the nation.

“We’d just ask the community to be aware of how busy we are and people with less urgent conditions may wait longer to be seen.”

Townsville remains the best performed hospital in Queensland for its patient off-stretcher time (POST) with 94 per cent of people moved into an emergency department treatment area from an ambulance within 30 minutes. 

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