CNA Insider
Christy Yip @ChristyYipCNA
Jinee Chen
19 Feb 2023 06:15AM (Updated: 19 Feb 2023 06:26AM)
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- Alcoholics kept returning to A&E in this hospital. So a medical team chose to help them at home
- Is going cold turkey the way to tackle alcoholism? For some patients, Khoo Teck Puat Hospital advocates a different approach by, for example, encouraging them to reduce their intake rather than harp on abstinence.
- Alcoholics kept returning to A&E in this hospital. So a medical team chose to help them at home
- The KTPH team helps patients achieve their personal goals, rather than focusing on their addiction.
- One patient used to drink nine cans of beer a day. The team helped her drop to three — through a badminton game with her family.
- Visits to the emergency department from these patients have dropped by more than half since the programme began in 2020.
SINGAPORE: Emergency physician Desmond Mao has encountered many a drunkard. At work, the protocol was to treat their physical ailments and send them home with a referral to an addictions specialist.
Outside of work, he used to give them a wide berth. Like most people, perhaps, he “didn’t want any trouble”, he said.
But these days, his nonchalance has turned to curiosity. It was propelled by a nagging problem in Khoo Teck Puat Hospital’s (KTPH)’s emergency department, where he has been practising for some 12 years: The same patients with alcohol misuse kept returning.
These patients could come in with chest or leg pains — symptoms of overdrinking — or could be brought in by paramedics because they were on the streets, flat-out drunk. Sometimes they were “rowdy” and caused the department “a bit of grief”.
After discharge, some would “come back straight away,” said Mao. “Some of them even come back two to three times a day.”
In 2017, he was tasked to look into the issue.
Indeed, a study published in the Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs found that between 2007 and 2016, the rate of alcohol-related emergency department visits across Singapore’s hospitals had increased by 62.4 per cent.
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Human beings are incredibly complex and twisted walking and talking “problems”.
Here’s fellow, who curiosity, leads to “gold” — a new approach.
I hope that we can learn from this and get a new strategy and some tactics to solve “homelessness”, drug addiction, and substance abuse.
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Reinke Faces Life 