Hospital administrations and judicial system do little to prevent assaults against nurses and other caregivers by patients

Emergency room and psychiatric nurses and workers involved in elder and in-home care are at an especially high risk. Credit: COD Newsroom via flickr

In a harrowing video that surfaced last month, a 68-year-old hospital patient attacks a group of nurses with a pipe pulled from his bed. They flee through a nearby door in a streak of rainbow scrubs, but the patient pursues and lands several more blows on one fallen nurse in the hallway.

This assault is far from an isolated incident. Health-care workers are hit, kicked, scratched, bitten, spat on, threatened and harassed by patients with surprising regularity. In a 2014 survey, almost 80 percent of nurses reported being attacked on the job within the past year. Health-care workers experience the most nonfatal workplace violence compared to other professions by a wide margin, with attacks on them accounting for almost 70 percent of all nonfatal workplace assaults causing days away from work in the U.S., according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And attacks show no sign of slowing down.

There is little movement toward stopping the assaults. There is a top-to-bottom cultural assumption that violence is part of the job for ER nurses and health-care workers, says Lisa Wolf, a registered nurse and research director for the Emergency Nurses Association. It goes from the bedside up to the judicial system.

But organizations such as the ENA and the American Nurses Association as well as government agencies involved in occupational safety say this doesnt have to be the case.

After the episode in Minnesota, the hospital initiated a training program to teach workers how to recognize and de-escalate potentially violent situations. Many hospitals lack this basic safety measure, howeveran oversight that leaves caregivers vulnerable. Better violence-prevention plansincluding training and incident reportingcan lessen the risk, but their adoption is stymied by indifference from police, prosecutors, judges and hospital administrations. The general disregard discourages health-care workers from reporting assaults, thus compounding the problem.

As you get more and more distance from the epicenter of the problem in the ER, people really feel like their administrations are way less engaged in mitigating violence, Wolf says. It makes people less invested in the work that they do because they feel less supported.

See the rest here:

Epidemic of Violence against Health-Care Workers Plagues Hospitals