IT IS, of course, a grim commentary on the times in which we live, when a police station has to be set up in an East Lancashire hospital to protect staff from violent and abusive patients. For it used to be that hospitals were among the safest and calmest environments in which anyone might find themselves.

Now it is the case that our front-line casualty staff work in accident and emergency departments that are statistically among the most dangerous in the world.

Indeed, a recent survey showed that, over the past year, there have been 65,000 violent incidents in the NHS with nurses the victims in two-thirds of the cases.

If such incidents are so appallingly routine, then the mini police station that is being set up at Blackburn Infirmary must be as welcome as it is wanted, even if its necessity is a dismal reflection of the brutalisation of our society - when people helping others can find themselves rewarded by blows and insults.

Yet, surely, this sad departure needs to bolstered by something more than the physical presence of police officers in our hospitals. And that is the full force of the law being felt by patients or others who assault or abuse NHS staff.

Doctors and nurses working in casualty are already frequently subject to severe stress as they cope with people in pain, often in life-or-death situations and amid anxiety and grief.

They deserve the fullest protection from the additional strain of suffering the violence and abuse that is increasingly heaped upon them.

It is the case that anyone accused of assaulting a police officer has more chance of going to jail than if they attacked someone else.

But should not medical staff in our hospitals have the same level of support from the law - with it applied to the extent that the existence of such a ticket-to-jail yardstick fast becomes imbued in the public psyche?

For if the courts threw the book at such offenders as they ought to - and, indeed, as the Lord Chancellor has formally urged them to - there would be little need for police stations in our hospitals.

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