Nurses facing violence

By Vik Kirsch, GuelphMercury.com

Nurses are increasingly alarmed by the threat of workplace violence, whether physical or psychological, says the head of an Ontario Nurses’ Association local bargaining unit.

“Nursing is a dangerous field. You wouldn’t think that it is, but you’re dealing with the public in stressful situations,” said Local 025 president Karen Accettola, referring to patients who may be ill; under the influence of alcohol or other drugs; feeling the effects of prescribed medications; or emotionally distraught.

Because of that, “there’s always a danger component” to nursing, Accettola said.

“All nurses can say that they’ve seen violence in the workplace.”

Accettola was commenting following yesterday’s Statistics Canada release of new details in a 2005 study on workplace risks.

The federal information agency found that 34 per cent of nurses in hospitals and long-term care facilities polled that year reported being physically assaulted by patients over the previous 12 months.

A higher number, 47 per cent, reported psychological abuse.

The assaults weren’t described by the reporting nurses, Statistics Canada senior analyst Margot Shields said yesterday.

“There weren’t any further definitions given,” Shields said.

Accettola, a birth nurse at Guelph General Hospital, said the facility recognizes the risk with recent improvements to security systems and creation of a new emergency department mental health unit, which opens officially next Monday.

Psychiatric nurses and male nurses appeared particularly at risk in the Statistics Canada study of responses from 12,200 nurses, part of a larger study involving 218,000 nurses. In this subset, 47 per cent of psychiatric nurses reported acts of physical violence, while 72 per cent reported emotional abuse. For male nurses, the respective figures were 46 and 55 per cent.

Overall, nurses reported the highest incidents in situations that included emergency and critical care, surgery, care for the elderly and psychiatric care.

Shields said initial findings were released in 2006.

“We’re now doing more in-depth studies (of the data),” Shields said, referring to yesterday’s release of the latest findings.

“The Statistics Canada report was not a shock to me at all and will not be by any means a shock to front-line nurses,” Ontario Nurses’ Association president Linda Haslam-Stroud said.

Threats to their safety are an ever-present danger for nurses.

“We’re living it each and every day,” Haslam-Stroud said.

It’s been escalating “for years” and if anything, is under-reported, she said, adding her organization is in discussion with the provincial government and employers in the health care field on how to reduce risk.

She’s confident Queen’s Park will amend provincial workplace safety laws later this year to include emotional abuse in the definition of violence.

Such abuse should include bullying, which she said is “prevalent” and sometimes perpetrated by physicians.

Haslam-Stroud said the wake-up call was the 2006 murder of Lori Dupont, a recovery room nurse at a Windsor hospital.

She was killed by a former lover, an an anesthesiologist at that hospital who died of a drug overdose several days later.

Haslam-Stroud is also hopeful employers will give the risk of abuse higher priority, through partial solutions like workplace risk assessments, increased camera surveillance, more opportunities for nurses to sound alarms in threatening situations and nurse training on how to de-escalate potentially violent situations.

Hiring more staff would allow better assessment of patients and workplaces, Haslam-Stroud said.

Related: Full report from Statistics Canada: Factors related to on-the-job abuse of nurses by patients