A WOMAN attacked a doctor who had been treating her boyfriend at a drugs clinic.

Blackburn magistrates heard Alice Rose Marie Moorhead, 32, who was also being seen by medical staff hit the doctor repeatedly before being dragged away.

She then forced her way back into the consulting room and tried to attack him again.

Moorhead, of Hesketh Street, Great Harwood, pleaded guilty to assaulting Dr Abhishek Goli. She was jailed for 18 weeks and ordered to pay £150 compensation on release.

The chairman of the magistrates said an immediate custodial sentence was justified because it had been a sustained attack on a member of the medical profession working on medical premises.

Parveen Akhtar, prosecuting, said Dr Goli was treating a man called Simon Leaver who was the partner of the defendant. She was in another consulting room seeing another doctor because they were both drug addicts.

Mr Leaver had a grievance about his methadone prescription which had gone from weekly to daily. He kept demanding that the doctor apologised to him and Miss Moorhead but he said he had nothing to apologise for.

"Mr Leaver, who is in a wheelchair, shouted for his partner and she barged into the consulting room," said Miss Akhtar. "She was shouting in the doctor's face and was so close he could feel spit landing on his face. She backed him into a corner and then she started hitting him across the head."

Gareth Price, defending, said it was accepted the assault was made worse because it was on a doctor who was trying to treat a patient.

"A lot of what you have heard involved her partner," said Mr Price. "She was in another consulting room when she heard her boyfriend shouting her name. When she emerged and saw her boyfriend being removed she accepts she lost her temper.

Mr Price said there was no physical harm to the doctor but his client recognised the incident would have distressed the doctor."