Violence against nurses and other hospital care givers usually doesn’t get much attention except in extreme cases. But, as the Los Angeles Times reports, hospital workers, particularly in emergency rooms and psychiatric wards, say assaults including biting, hitting, kicking and chasing happen so often they consider it part of the job.
Although many industry experts and hospital workers say they believe the violence is growing, spotty records have made it difficult to document the scope of the problem.
A review by the Times, however, found that nine cases of assault that led to significant injuries or deaths were reported to California’s Department of Public Health from fiscal year 2007 through fiscal 2009. The newspaper also found that, during the same period, 370 hospital workers filed workers compensation claims alleging that they were injured in criminal assaults — a tally that excluded assaults not considered crimes, such as attacks by someone with a psychosis.
Other research reflects how common the problem has become. For instance, a 2007 survey found that nearly 40 percent of California’s emergency room employees said they had been assaulted on the job in the previous year. Also, more than one in 10 emergency room nurses surveyed in 2010 said they had been attacked in the previous week, according to the Emergency Nurses Assn., which represents 40,000 emergency room nurses nationally.
One nurse, DeAnne Dansby, said that a patient had tackled and tried to rape her in February, 2010, in the emergency room at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento, and she fell so hard that her head “ricocheted” on the floor.
By the time help arrived, “this guy already had my scrub pants down almost to my knees,” she said. “It took 13 people to get this idiot off of me. That guy could have killed me.”
Bonnie Castillo, head of the California Nurses Assn., said hospital officials discourage nurses from reporting assaults because “it interferes with their image of being a safe haven.” Her union and other hospital unions have begun pushing for more protection for employees and increased reporting of incidents by hospitals.
Kathleen McPhaul, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing who has studied hospital violence and believes it is rising, said hospitals sometimes blame employees for mishandling violence instead of reporting and investigating it.
In fact, not a single assault was reported to the Los Angeles Police Department by nearly a third of the 40 hospitals in the city, the Times found. On the other hand, at California Hospital Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles, nine were reported.
According to a spokeswoman for the medical center, the reports did not indicate that her hospital has more of a problem than other hospitals. Rather, she said, the figures reflect that the administration encourages employees to report assaults.
A spokeswoman for the California Hospital Assn., an industry group, said hospitals “generally are very safe places,” and that most have procedures for dealing with trouble.
CHRISTINE YOUNG
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