The police, emergency services and Oulu University Hospital are increasingly overstretched due to large numbers of intoxicated people and are demanding a detoxification centre.

Oulu University Hospital currently has to deal with about 1400 drunks being delivered to Accident and Emergency every year. According to hospital officials, this diverts attention from other patients and some kind of specific detoxification centre would be a more appropriate place for drunk patients than Accident and Emergency.

Hospital representatives claim that the problem is particularly acute at weekends when people from surrounding municipalities converge upon Oulu to socialise. Those who drink dangerous amounts all end up at Oulu University Hospital. People from up to seventeen municipalities find themselves at the hospital needing care at the weekends.

Dr Matti Martikäinen, who works at the hospital, told YLE that emergency patients encompass a broad variety, from children to the elderly. They all end up having to mix with drunk people, meaning that ‘all the patients suffer.’

Some inebriated people are sufficiently dangerous to patients and staff that Accident and Emergency has had its own security guard since 2008. Sometimes the situation has become so risky that other guards, and even the police, have been called in because of drunken aggression.

According to the doctor, most drunks need to just be left alone to ‘sleep it off’ and sober up and this is why a detoxification centre would be the best solution. However, the money cannot be found to fund it.

Oulu’s police also find that their resources are being wasted by people drinking too much. They pick up about 3000 drunks per year. According to a police spokesman, if a drunk in their cells is not from Oulu then an officer may have to spend a good chunk of their shift tracking down where they do come from.

An advisory committee recommended in 2009 that a part of the city’s police station could be converted into a detoxification centre, as most drunks end up in the back of ambulances or police vans and could simply be conveyed there. If this were followed, only the most serious cases of drunkenness – such as those with injuries – would be taken to the hospital.