A sheriff gave a teenage girl a furious 20-minute dressing down after being told she attacked a nurse by biting her in a hospital’s busy accident and emergency department.
Sheriff Lindsay Foulis lectured Natasha Harwood, 18, after hearing that at least five police officers and medical staff had to restrain her during her drunken rampage.
He slammed Harwood’s appalling behaviour and said she had hampered the treatment of genuinely unwell patients and wasted emergency staff time with a “self-absorbed” display of drunken thuggery.
Sheriff Foulis ordered the teenager to stand and said: “It is perhaps appropriate when you are standing before me, presumably sober, to put your behaviour in perspective.
“Three police officers are taken from their duties to deal with you and when they get there you are also taking the attention of two members of A&E staff who would presumably be better employed doing something other than keeping you under control to prevent you creating further disturbance.
“That is the result of your thoughtless actions. Do you get it? People’s time has been wasted because folk like you think it’s a good idea to get so out of your mind you require medical treatment.”
Harwood, 18, of Goshen Crescent, Scone, admitted attacking and injuring senior staff nurse Gwenda Boyd by biting her hand and scratching her at PRI on October 26.
A second charge of assaulting Dr Katherine Hill was dropped.
Sentence was deferred for Harwood to complete the Right Track programme for young offenders.