On Wednesday, 180 nurses and other healthcare workers will meet for a
booked-to-capacity session on workplace violence for healthcare workers,
sponsored by the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied
Professionals union. It highlights the grim reality that nurses are
increasingly facing violence on the job.
The event will be held in a ballroom at the Philadelphia Airport Hilton.
Christine Pontus, a nurse and occupational health and safety director
for the Massachusetts Nurses Association, will be the lead speaker at
Wednesday's event. District attorneys from Philadelphia and Delaware
County are scheduled to attend.
This follows bursts of violence towards nurses in the Philadelphia area.
A Temple University Hospital emergency-room nurse, Joan Meissler, 53,
was attacked by a patient when she tried to restrain the girl from
grabbing needles from an empty examination room this summer. Meissler is
now working on light duty until she has recovered from the attack which
left her with permanent pain and plummeting finances. Meissler wants a
billboard erected with her picture next to an image of her attacker,
Amber Knierim, 20, to send a message to those who might undervalue
nurses enough to hurt them: " 'Lay a hand on one of our staff members
and you'll spend the next five years in jail.' " Without singling Temple
out, union president Patricia Eakin noted worriedly, "It's a national
problem."
The Emergency Nurses Association has kept an eye on this issue and
reported that between 8 and 13 percent of emergency-room nurses suffer
physical violence every week. According the 2009 statistics from the
U.S. Department of Labor, paramedics and nursing aids are extremely
likely to miss work because of injuries, second only to police and
correctional officers. Most of these injuries are banal and come from
overexertion cause by heavy lifting, but last year there were 38
incidents of violent assaults per 10,000 nurses aides.
Nurses are often in such a risky position because they are the primary
physical interface that a patient has at the medical facility. The
dismal economic climate has not helped either. Hospitals are reducing
nursing and security staff to cut costs, and similar budged constraints
are limiting options for the treatment and care of mentally ill patients
and addicts. The recession also worked against nurse from the outside
in. The general public, suffering under the burden of financial loss and
rampant unemployment, enter hospitals with more tension and become more
quickly frustrated by lengthy waits for treatment, lashing out at their
primary source of contact: nurses.
Crozer-Chester Medical Center emergency room nurse Sean Poole, 33,
characterized the violence that nurses face in the workplace as less
striking in nature than Meissler's case. The bulk of attacks against
nurses are not prosecutable. Poole has been punched and bitten, but has
never pressed charges. "It's hard to get anything to stick," he said.
"If they are intoxicated, it won't hold up because they were
intoxicated. If they are mentally ill, it won't hold up because they
aren't in their right mind."
There is a sentiment floating around that nurses and others should
accept violence as part of the job, according to Pontus. "A lot of times
the victims are traumatized and afraid to speak," especially if the
organizational culture doesn't support them," she said. "There is a
stigma of victimization, embarrassment, fear of being blamed for
provoking the assault, fear of job loss. The patients abuse us and we
abuse each other. We're all post-traumatic out there."