Now how scary is this. Isn’t being a nurse hard enough without having to worry about being attacked by your wonderful patients or their loving family members?

The NY Times printed a wonderful story about dangers in the hospital. Finally, something other than the usual whining about the nursing shortage and how we have to step up recruitment and sanitize nursing so that students and potential students don’t know what they’re getting themselves in for. Just visit www.discovernursing.com if you want to see the greatest con job ever told.

But getting back to workplace violence–of course, hospitals say that its not their fault.

Richard Wade, a spokesman for the American Hospital Association, said health care facilities should not necessarily be blamed for patient violence. “These things don’t happen because of breaches of security,” he said, “but because something happens that you can’t predict, and nurses are on the front lines.”

But Mr. Wade added that hospitals were very much aware of the issue and were addressing safety concerns in a variety of ways, among them increasing camera surveillance, expanding the security staff and training employees to deal with potentially violent situations.

“You want to have good security, but you don’t want it to feel like going through an airport screening or like a place in lockdown,” he said. “Hospitals are by their very nature supposed to be open, caring places where patients and families feel safe and don’t feel imprisoned.”

Hmmm…does that sound like PR spintalk or what?

Maybe they can’t predict violent episodes, but they can certainly be better equipped to handle them. Like what about having an emergency button in every room, that a nurse can press if a patient or visiting even shows signs of hostility. And the response to the call button is 2 minutes or less. Is that possible? Of course it is, but most hospitals don’t really care if their nurses get beat up. They don’t want to invest money in their protection. In fact, many nurses say that they are discouraged from writing up incident reports. Nursing schools still fail to teach that nurses are not punching bags, and there should be zero tolerance of abuse from anyone. Hospitals are more interested in customer service, and in not antagonize the patient or family, even they push the nurse out the window.

There should be security in the emergency rooms at all times. Security should be patrolling round the clock. But despite Mr. Wade’s cheery spin, most facilities are woefully lacking in trained security, and response time is dismal. And yes, hospitals are places where patients and families should feel safe, but then, so should staff. And having extra security also protects patients.

The article goes on to say that according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, half of all nonfatal injuries resulting from workplace assaults occur in health care and social service settings. While some areas of healthcare are intrinsically more dangerous than the average office, ie, a psychiatric setting, that is still no excuse. There should be extra security. Nurses should never have to be in a vulnerable position in a ward or facility where violence occurs on a regular basis. Nursing homes have some of the poorest staffing, yet they are prime for violence because of the mental disturbances of many of the residents. Yes, that little old lady can pack a punch.

This is the most frightening of all:

The level of violence may well be higher, since the government figures include only the most serious incidents. A booklet published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2004 noted that violence in health facilities was “likely to be underreported, perhaps due in part to the persistent perception within the health care industry that assaults are part of the job.”

I rest my case. This perception didn’t come out of nowhere. The lack of protection for staff, the idea that nurses aren’t supposed to complain–even if a patient is crashing a chair over their heads, and the failure of hospitals to stand up for their staff. It’s the ER, these things happen. A gunshot isn’t so bad, you’ll get over it. so what if the patient bit your head off–there’s worse things in life…

But you know, this all goes back to nurses and other staff taking a stand. Nurses have to stand up for themselves, they need to file incident report and press charges (horror of horrors) and need to refuse to work if conditions are unsafe.