This week’s news that gardaí are to be rostered to do shifts at the Mercy University Hospital in Cork city centre - because of escalating levels of violence towards frontline staff - may have surprised some, but to those of us who have chosen a career in acute healthcare, it is merely a reminder of a grim reality.

In January 2005, when I was the ‘lead clinician’ at the Emergency Department (ED) of the Mercy, I coined the phrase "urban savages" to describe the two hooded men who had burst into the ED early one Saturday morning in pursuit of another young man they had already battered on the street and, in the subsequent melee, attacked him again, as well as hospital staff, with batons and pepper spray. This resulted in one nurse having to take sick leave with respiratory and eye complaints, not to mention mental distress.