A PERSISTENT drunk who plagued the Great Western Hospital’s accident and emergency department and scared off other patients has been banned from being inebriated in any public place in Wiltshire.

Swindon County Court heard John Broadway, 55, had cost the hospital and ambulance services more than £45,000.

He had made more 119 emergency calls to the ambulance between January 10 last year and January 14 this year and turned up in casualty 37 times over the same period.

Deputy District Judge Sally Smith made the anti-social behaviour order yesterday after hearing Broadway would arrive at the hospital intoxicated and was frequently doubly incontinent, which meant nurses had to clean him up and provide him with replacement clothes.

Swindon Borough Council solicitor Francis Maples, who made the application, said that instead of leaving the hospital after being discharged, he would return to the waiting area and beg for money and food. He would also soil himself again.

“The evidence includes a parent taking a child home before being seen by the doctor because of the smell coming from Mr Broadway,” he said.

Mr Maples said the matron had described Broadway causing a great deal of alarm and distress in the waiting area.

On December 30 doctors decided to admit him for a full assessment, but he refused and discharged himself. He then returned to the hospital on six days running from January 12 at a time when it was under major pressure.

Following that a multi-agency meeting was held and an application was made for an injunction.

Mr Maples said: “This is not a case of someone who is down on his luck and no one has attempted to help him.

“He is of no fixed abode. That is his choice. Wiltshire Council’s homeless team offered him accommodation in Melksham on March 19, 2015. He returned they keys the following day claiming that his room did not have a TV and he was rude and abusive to staff."

But he stressed a balance had to be drawn between Broadway’s needs and those of other patients and staff.

Broadway is now in the Taunton area, where the notice was served on him at a hospital. But ambulances have picked him up from all over the South West, from Bournemouth and Okehampton to Bath, Bristol and Gloucester.

The order also bans him from being in possession of an open container of alcohol in any public place in the county.

It bars him from remaining on the premises of any hospital in Wiltshire after he has been discharged from treatment and he is banned from “shouting or swearing aggressively or otherwise acting in a foul, abusive or threatening manner in any street or public place anywhere within Wiltshire.”

Mr Maples added: “I’m gratified, for the sake of the hard pressed hospital staff and for other patients and their relatives in hospital.”

A spokesman for the Great Western Hospital said: “Our staff work incredibly hard 365 days a year caring for local people when they are most in need of emergency care and treatment.

“We do all we can to protect our staff and will not tolerate any form of physical or verbal abuse. We ask that all local people use our services responsibly.”