AN AMBULANCE crew with a drunk person every 21 minutes in Scotland, with paramedics attending more than 25,000 separate incidents where alcohol intoxication was a factor in the call-out, according to new figures.
There were 80,000 such calls over the two years up to 2014, but there are warnings the true problem may be far higher as alcohol is not being recorded properly as a factor in every incident.
The release of the figures, under Freedom of Information, led to renewed calls from the Conservatives for alcohol recovery centres to divert drunk patients away from accident and emergency departments
The party's health spokesman Jackson Carlaw MSP said: "This is a tricky issue and it's a terrible situation that our ambulance crews are having to deal with drunks so frequently.
"That's why we are calling for the setting up of recovery centres which have already been successfully up-and-running in America and Australia."
Mr Carlaw said the centres would free up clinical staff by taking intoxicated patients away from casualty departments.
He said it would aid ambulance crews by enabling them to get to life or death situations more quickly.
The Scottish Ambulance Service said that it dealt with a total of 79,761 incidents due to a person being drunk between 2012 and last year. In 2014, there were 25,071 cases.
The greatest proportion of those incidents came in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board area, with 25,926 recorded incidents in the last three years.
Orkney saw just nine such cases in the same period.
The service previously released figures showing a rise in the number of assaults on crews, from 228 in 2010 to 306 in 2012.
Emergency workers were victims of pushing, punching and spitting and were assaulted with weapons.
The attacks have not been restricted to frontline workers, with a trainee paramedic assaulted while at college while another incident occurred at the service's national headquarters.
Attack victim Michael Ross, 28, risked the lives of a crew when he opened the door of an ambulance as he was being driven to hospital.
The incident in June last year on the A92 came as the crew were en-route with him to Kirkcaldy. A paramedic jumped on him to stop him falling onto the road.
Ross, of Ballingry, Fife, pleaded guilty in court to assaulting, distracting and hindering paramedics and was electronically tagged for for six months.
An ambulance service spokesman said: "Alcohol and drug related cases have a significant impact on ambulance operations and often account for a high proportion of demand, as well as being a consistent factor in incidents of abuse and assaults on staff."
Barbara O'Donnell, acting chief executive of Alcohol Focus Scotland, said: "These figures are yet more evidence of the negative impact that excessive drinking is having on our emergency services.
"Ambulance crews are spending far too much time dealing with the effects of alcohol and are often on the receiving end of verbal and physical abuse from people who have had too much to drink."
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