Hospital patients are exhibiting unprecedented levels of frustration, fear and hostility and nurses are feeling their wrath, Ellie Blasco, a registered nurse at UCHealth said recently.
“Most definitely over the past two years we have seen increases in workplace violence in hospitals,” said Blasco, who is also director of clinical quality and risk management for UCHealth. “The statistics on this are really breathtaking.”
One in four nurses reported being assaulted while at work in 2022, an increase of 23%, Blasco said. “What’s going on is astounding.”
Blasco said the feelings of rancor have grown rapidly since she was a bedside nurse nearly a decade ago. “It’s a different world now,” Blasco said.
Blasco and UCHealth’s Phil Wynn, emergency preparedness program manager for UCHealth, said COVID-19 has fueled the bad feelings. “We’ve asked our patients to do things they haven’t had to do in the past,” Wynn said.
COVID-19 restrictions meant patients often could not see their families, sparking anxieties and sometimes outright hostility toward hospital workers, Wynn said. Throw in mask requirements, and patients and their families often vented loudly and sometimes violently, he said.
“In many cases, people simply (have) had it,” Wynn said.
An analysis from Press Ganey — which surveys patients for their experiences throughout the country — states that on average, 57 nurses are assaulted every day in the U.S. The Press Ganey results were published last week in the online magazine MedPage Today.
Those statistics mean two nurses are attacked every hour in the United States, Press Ganey states.
To some advocates for nurse safety, the persistence of violence against nurses is nothing new, MedPage states. “There’s very few protections for nurses because it is a female-dominated profession,” Gerard Brogan, RN, director of nursing practices at National Nurses United, told MedPage. “But as we saw, as with a lot of stresses on the RN profession during the pandemic, it amplifies everything.”
The stresses on nurses have led to burnout and leaving the profession, Blasco said. “I know we’ve had nurses who have retired early or gone onto different professions.”
The vacancies have contributed to a nationwide nursing shortage, she said. Hospitals have tried to keep nurses on the payroll stressed by frontline work by finding them slots in call centers or in telehealth, Blasco said.
“We don’t want to lose that experience they have gathered all these years so we try to put them in places where they can still help people,” she said.
UCHealth — which includes UCHealth Longs Peak in Longmont and UCHealth Broomfield — is responding to the rising tide of violence and verbal assaults on nurses in a variety of ways.
Code Gray teams of security personnel, social workers and health supervisors are among a “swarm” of health members who respond to incidents of nurse abuse and come up with solutions of care, Wynn said.
“Our focus is on a team approach to employing non-violent escalation techniques,” Wynn said. “We try to set boundaries with a patient with the goal of providing patient care and keeping everyone safe.”
UCHealth hospital rooms also include a zero tolerance policy sign plastered on the wall for patients to see.
The zero tolerance policy outlines what is not allowed in hospital rooms including:
- Yelling
- Swearing
- Insults against someone’s race
- Threatening others
- Physical attacks
- Tampering with or destruction of any property
- Using or having:
- Illegal drugs
- Alcohol
- Marijuana
- Tobacco
- E-cigarettes
- Words, actions or behaviors with sexual meaning.are also banned.
UCHealth maintains good relations with local law enforcement and hospital officials will not hesitate to call officers if a patient becomes dangerous, Wynn said.
Nurses nearing the brink with a patient, can also ask another nurse to take over that patient’s care, Blasco said.
“Sometimes Nurse A just cannot get along with a patient, while Nurse B can deal with that patient without too much of a problem,” she said. “We just want to give everyone the best care and to keep everyone safe.”
