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 A new report that reviews research on assaults against doctors,
nurses and other medical personnel concludes that healthcare workers
often experience physical and verbal attacks, and, all too often,
little is done to address it.
"Health care workplace violence is an underreported, ubiquitous, and
persistent problem that has been tolerated and largely ignored,"
writes Dr. James Phillips of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, in the New England Journal of
Medicine.
"Our industry is, statistically, the most violent
non-law-enforcement industry in the United States. And that's using
government statistics that have been shown to under-report the
actual violence that takes place by up to 70 percent," he told
Reuters Health.
The violence is often tied to patients with dementia and mental
health or substance abuse problems.
But in a significant number of cases, firearms can be involved.
"Between 2000 and 2011, there were 154 shootings with injury either
inside or on the grounds of American hospitals, most frequently
outdoors on the hospital campus (41 percent), in the emergency
department (29 percent), or on inpatient floors (19 percent),"
Phillips writes. "The most frequently ascribed motives were revenge
(27 percent), suicide (21 percent), and mercy killing (14 percent)."
In a mental health setting, 70 percent of staff members are
physically assaulted each year, and "among psychiatric aides, the
rate is 69 times the national rate of violence in the workplace,"
Phillips writes.
And in nursing homes, where dementia is a problem, one survey found
that 59 percent of nursing home aides reported being assaulted
weekly.
"One reason health care providers are reluctant to report these is
that we have compassion for our patients, and we don't want to treat
patients like they're criminals or the enemy," Phillips said. "So we
probably make excuses when we shouldn't, and we overlook patients
who are intoxicated or on drugs, and other patients who have altered
mental status because of chronic dementia or acute delirium. They
are already vulnerable, and we don't want to treat them as if they
are criminals."
Phillips became interested in the issue after being assaulted twice
in the past five years.
The first time was while training in a Chicago hospital where an
intoxicated patient "spit blood in my face knowing he had hepatitis
C. I was forced to undergo six months of testing. I was never asked
if I wanted to file a police report or press charges."
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The second time was in a community hospital when he asked an
emergency room patient to stop screaming and cursing because there
were two children in the next stall. The woman threw her cell phone,
struck him in the face, and then stood up and spit on him in the
presence of a police officer. She was ultimately convicted of
assault and battery.
"The majority of healthcare providers who have been assaulted don't
feel that their concerns are taken seriously," he said.
The best solution isn't clear because little research has been done
on the best ways to thwart attacks, he adds.
Some possibilities:
- Being tough on verbal assaults; acting aggressively against such
cases may prevent them from escalating.
- Changing the law to make a physical attack on a health care worker
a felony.
- Redesigning patient charts to flag past instances of violence, an
approach in use in the Veterans Affairs system.
Metal detectors might appear to be an option. A 2003 study reported
that one emergency department with a metal detector confiscated
3,446 weapons in eight months. But firearms were seldom found. Most
of the weapons were knives.
Moreover, “there's not any evidence that reducing the number of
weapons reduces violence, because so much of the violence isn't
committed with a weapon. It's committed with fists and feet,"
Phillips said.
"We don't have any evidence that shows that any one particular
solution is actually effective at reducing workplace violence," he
said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1SJHf20 New England Journal of Medicine,
online April 27, 2016.
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