Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is important to say that all major emergency departments have security on site. It is not just mental health patients who can attack staff or other patients. It is a very sad feature of our health service that sometimes patients attack staff. It can be true for ambulance crew and even reception staff. It is an unfortunate reality that we have to face all the time. When psychiatric patients present in emergency departments, they generally do so with other problems also. A patient may have had an overdose, which is a medical toxicological issue that must be dealt with first. A patient may have injured himself, cut his wrists, tried to hang himself, even tried to shoot himself or done some other form of harm to himself. A patient can also present with very severe medical problems because he has not been looking after himself due to his psychiatric illness. For example, he may have a very bad infection. All of those things must be dealt with first. It is not the case that someone with a mental illness can be shipped straight to the psych ward. It should never have been done that way. When a patient has medical, surgical or other problems, it is important that those are dealt with first and the patient is medically cleared before he goes to the psych ward.

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