Healthcare workers in Ontario are using Nursing Week, which runs from May 8 to 14, as an opportunity to lobby for support for federal legislative changes that would make violence against nurses a more serious and punishable offence.

On the morning of May 2, two registered practical nurses spoke at the provincial legislature in Toronto to ask the Ontario government to back a proposed amendment to the Criminal Code, according to a news release from the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). Sandra Hillcoat, based in Kitchener, and Maggie Jewell from Lindsay shared true stories of healthcare professionals who had been seriously injured, sometimes permanently, following attacks by patients.

“We are asking for recognition for Nursing Week, in the form of a signal from Ontario’s provincial politicians, that the wave of violent assaults against nurses and healthcare staff is unacceptable,” Hillcoat said at the legislature, as quoted in the release.

“Violence against healthcare staff is normalized by our employers as an accepted hazard of our work,” said Jewell at the legislature. “Patients and their families take out their frustration over an increasingly under-resourced and stressed health system on healthcare staff.

“Healthcare workplaces that are unsafe for staff are also unsafe for the public we care for.”

CUPE’s proposed legal change would apply to sections 264 and 266-269 of the Code. Available on a PDF document from the union’s website, the amendment reads that judges who impose sentences for assaults against healthcare professionals should “consider as an aggravating circumstance the fact that the victim of the offence was, at the time of the commission of the offence, a healthcare worker engaged in the performance of his or her duty.”

On May 5, a group of nurses with CUPE Local 1974 held a media conference at the Artillery Park Aquatic Centre in Kingston, requesting that MPP Sophie Kiwala support the proposed amendment.

“We are looking for something meaningful. We want more than accolades and statements read in the Legislature about the dedication, skills and compassion of nurses,” said Kingston nurse Amanda Poisson at the conference. “We want MPPs… to make it a priority to help end the increasing violence healthcare staff are facing on the job.”

Poisson was joined at the conference by Local 1974 president Mike Rodrigues and Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, stated a separate CUPE news release.

About 50 per cent of nurses in Ontario were assaulted in 2014, according to the union.