Alcohol and drugs key driver of emergency department admissions, study of Alfred Hospital shows

Drunk and drug-affected Victorians are choking up Victoria’s largest trauma centre and efforts to address such behaviour have hit a plateau, a new study shows.

Alcohol plays a key role in driving trauma admissions on Friday and Saturday nights.

An alarming number of drunk and drug-affected Victorians are ending up in the country’s largest adult trauma centre following serious incidents of violence or major injuries in the home or at play.

A new study published on Monday has revealed at least one in three patients at The Alfred’s busy Emergency and Trauma Centre in Melbourne were injured in “non-transport” events while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs (AOD).

These are patients not injured in a car, riding an electric scooter or another form of mobile transport.

Most patients in the study were seriously hurt in “high falls”, which is from a height greater than a metre.

Alarming numbers of drunk and drug-affected Victorians are ending up in Alfred’s emergency department. Picture: David Crosling

The study found alcohol played the biggest role in these major injuries in adults over the age of 18, and most often occurred on Friday and Saturday nights in Melbourne.

Illicit drugs such as cannabis were most common in people hurt on Sunday nights.

The results of the Monash University-led study with Alfred Health emergency and trauma experts have now prompted calls for urgent public education campaigns.

“Traditionally, the focus of prevention … has almost exclusively been on drink and drug driving,” lead author Georgina Lau says.

A PhD candidate at the Monash School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Ms Lau says it now needs to include strategies that address AOD use as a risk for all causes of injury.

“We know alcohol and drugs are associated with injuries, but our results for those not related to transport were surprising,” she said.

“It is pretty clear from our findings that we need to be doing something.”

Monash University's Georgina Lau who was the alcohol and drug injury study's lead author

The study, thought to be a Victorian first, involved more than 1200 adults who attended the hospital between July 2021 and the end of 2022.

“Police regulation has assisted with reducing drink driving-related harms through interventions such as random breath testing and enforcement of low blood alcohol limits while driving; however, these reductions have plateaued,” Ms Lau said.

“Our findings demonstrate the need to establish whole-of-population surveillance systems that can be used to inform the implementation of prevention strategies.”

Professor Biswadev Mitra, co-author of the study and an emergency physician at The Alfred Emergency and Trauma Centre, said that the exposure to alcohol and other drugs added a substantial degree of complexity to assessing and managing injured patients.

“Highlighting the association of alcohol and other drugs with major trauma is an essential step to empowering people with the knowledge of the high risks and cost of substance use,” he said.

The study, published in Emergency Medicine Australasia, also found while men were the most likely to be injured while under the influence, a third of the women being treated at the trauma centre were found to be alcohol or drug-impacted.

“Injuries were consistent across all age groups and gender,” Ms Lau said.

These could include “low falls” like tripping on pavements or curbs, falling down stairs, getting into fights or intentionally self-harming. High falls are those higher than a metre like falling off ladders or tables.