Hospital Employees Are Increasingly Becoming Victims of Violence
A VA hospital should be a place of treatment, healing and recovery. Too often, though, hospitals are places of violence where employees are assaulted by patients and visitors. If you work at a VA hospital and are injured in an attack, we may be able to obtain compensation for your injuries.
Health care workers deal with more violent incidents than workers in any other occupation in the United States, including cabdrivers, convenience store clerks and bartenders, according to the federal government, reports The News Times, a newspaper covering Danbury, Connecticut.
The article followed an incident in which a nurse was shot by an 85-year-old patient at Danbury Hospital. When the hospital’s president, Frank Kelly, was asked if the number of violent incidents in hospitals is rising, he responded, “Without question.” In the article, Kelly states that most attacks are made by the growing elderly population, particularly those suffering from dementia.
The article states much of the violence in hospitals goes unreported and perpetrators face no consequences for their acts. “If you were a police officer and you were kicked and slapped and spat on, the person who did those things would be arrested,” Jonathan Rosen, director of occupational safety and health for the New York State Public Employees Union, was quoted as saying.
After a patient at a California emergency room lunged at and chased two nurses with a pair of scissors, one of the ER nurses started keeping track of how many times a colleague was assaulted or threatened by a patient. She found an average of about one incident every day, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Times reports,
Hospitals sometimes blame employees for mishandling violence rather than reporting and investigating it, said Kathleen McPhaul, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing who has written about hospital violence and believes it is rising. “Even if the staff did something wrong,” she said, “the employer needs to take responsibility and get to the bottom of it and train the staff.”
Emergency departments are having an especially difficult time with violence. According to The Times, a 2007 survey found nearly 40 percent of employees in California emergency rooms said they had been assaulted on the job in the previous year. More than one in 10 emergency room nurses reported being attacked in the previous week, according to a 2010 survey by the Emergency Nurses Association, which represents 40,000 emergency room nurses nationally.
Contact Uliase & Uliase
Violence against anyone is wrong, especially if it’s directed at a health care professional who’s trying to help. If you’re a VA hospital professional injured on the job, contact our office to learn more about compensation for your injuries.
