Since the B.C. Nurses’ Union (BCNU) announced that it would be lobbying for criminal charges in cases of violence against healthcare professionals (COHSN, March 3), more attacks against nurses have occurred in the province – including an especially brutal one at Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre in Abbotsford, just outside Greater Vancouver.
“It’s just been a really unfortunate week,” BCNU vice president Christine Sorensen said. “We’ve had a number of significant violent events across the province.”
The Abbotsford incident occurred on March 1, according to information from Fraser Health (FH), which runs the hospital. A male patient arrived in the emergency room and became agitated while a male nurse was assessing him. He beat the nurse severely around the head and face, resulting in eye surgery and stitches to his eye, face and forehead.
“He just kind of came at the nurse,” explained Ken Donohue, FH’s director of public affairs. “Security was there very quickly.” He characterized the attack as “an isolated incident” that “was out of the blue and unprovoked.”
The event was highly traumatic for the nurse, who will be off work for a while to undergo both physical and psychological recovery, Sorensen explained. The nurse “is, at this point, unsure of whether or not he will be able to return to nursing and certainly unsure whether to return to that unit.”
BCNU, which is pursuing criminal charges in the Abbotsford incident, responded as soon as it had been informed of it. “Our local representatives were onsite, making sure that the nurse was taken care of,” Sorensen said. “We notified WorkSafeBC, and they immediately dispatched an investigator to the site.” The police would be laying charges on the patient upon his release from the hospital, she added.
In a March 2 press release, the union accused the Abbotsford facility of having ignored BCNU’s requests for increased security since 2011. But Donohue maintained that the hospital was doing what it could to protect its workers.
“Anytime an incident like this happens, it gives us pause to look at our processes,” he said. “But the challenge in nursing and healthcare is that the staff are dealing with a very unpredictable environment. The behaviour of patients can be very unpredictable, and so while you think that you have all the security and safety processes in place, there are times, unfortunately, where these types of incidences will happen.”
Sorensen said that healthcare authorities needed to start being more proactive in dealing with violence in emergency rooms. “We’re also hoping that they will recognize that violent events occur in other parts of the healthcare system, whether they’re being in other inpatient units or residential care in the community,” she said. “We definitely need public awareness that this is inappropriate.”
Among the possible solutions Sorensen suggested were additional Code White training and security. “We’re also right now demanding that health authorities take a serious look at their environments that nurses practise in and provide security personnel or safety officers,” she noted, “who are trained to physically restrain patients.”
Donohue said that FH was already acting in response to the Abbotsford incident. “We’ve increased security,” he said. “We will be adding additional security to the Emergency and to the hospital. And we encourage staff to partake in the training and education sessions that are available to them, violence-prevention training, and that’s really important for people, to understand how they can deescalate certain situations.”
Before the incident occurred, the hospital had recently made changes to the infrastructure of its triage area in order to provide additional security, Donohue added.
The Abbotsford hospital was fined $75,000 for inaction on a violence issue last May, according to information from BCNU.