That’s so freaking sad. No wonder I’ve noticed all these placards at every medical establishment now that say “We will not tolerate any aggression towards our staff.”
I hope they enforce the notion, but I’m so sad such a sign is necessary in the first place.
I hated hearing how patients and their family members were able to verbally and sometimes even physically abuse my mother with no consequences when I was growing up.
This is a good article, what I could read of it before it was cut off by a pay wall. It explains the breakdown in the healthcare system, at the emergency room, quite well. The failures of the healthcare system end up in the waiting room of ERs, across the nation, because EMTALA says it’s the one place no one can be turned away.
Hospital administration is 100% aware, but since the solutions involve more payroll expenses, they do nothing, while pocketing millions or even billions. Clinics are often owned by investment firms hence the abysmal profit centered rules thrust upon doctors a in that setting of late, to the detriment of patient care. End result, patients suffer and nurses get hurt.
There are hospitals in which the security staff wears Kevlar for a reason. Sometimes, family members are the worst offenders, hence the visitor restrictions often encountered across the nation.
State law is highly impactful, but not many states implement such guards due to the everpresent hospital lobby. The baseline is the hospital administration is always represented in the state legislature. You can help by writing to your state reps, which is the only lobby available to patient care. The federal side is useless, more so now, but the state reps are more accessible and can have more impact than you think, on both your patient care and everyone else’s. If you’d like to assist the effort of these nurses, writing your reps is what you can do. Unions help, but the true long term fix is going to be state legislation reining in hospital administration profit hunger.
16-17 patients at a time is absurd. There can be no safety for patient, nurse, or doctor in that system. States that have put safety checks on their hospitals limit those numbers to 1-5 patients per nurse, depending on acuity.
No wonder nurses are in the streets right now.
The Pitt had an episode(s?) about that. A guy was frustrated about having to wait so he sucker punch some poor nurse on a smoke break.
That was included in the show, as so many other things are to get people talking about it, but a punch isn’t a particularly out of the ordinary bad day according to all of the nurses I know. Even those that work in private practices have had to deal with violence fairly regularly from patients and/or family members.
Nurses get thrown???
Wtf
Well I’m a 340 pound 6’6" nurse so I don’t.
If a patient throws out their back trying to throw you though, that just ends up being more work for you.
The mighty battle nurse!
I would think it’s usually by family members of the patients, but to be a patient in the hospital, your body is no longer obeying regular functions, so the unexpected becomes the norm.
Its usually patients, they often don’t have full capacity (either altered for organic underlying reasons, or substance use, etc…) and usually for that reason it goes unreported.
If they aren’t responsible for their actions they should be considered legally incompetent by the state and their guardian should have to pay damages.
That’s silly. If professionals can’t subdue a person completely out of control, you can’t expect a layman to do it instead.
There are a lot of legal restrictions on how the hospital is allowed respond to violent patients
Call ICE. They have zero legal restrictions.
It’s cultural, not employer-action, & therefore … striking isn’t going to change anything?
Unless enforcing-accountability-on-patients becomes a thing…
but hospitals won’t EVER tolerate accountability on themselves, in my experience: the institution/gang/pack/herd HAS TOTAL IMMUNITY, to use Trump’s phrase from his ICE…
so it’ll always be selective accountability, among “institutions”/gangs/herds/packs/unions/classes/etc.
How depressing: NO amount of damage from factionalism-displacing-objectivity, will EVER be sufficient for humankind to take a sold stand against factionalism’s narcissism/machiavellianism…
Whatever: there will be other worlds: souls can go incarnate among them, after this one’s extinguished…
_ /\ _
And I gotta pay good money for all that
