ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - Workplace violence at hospitals have become a long-term problem for not the state of Missouri, but nationally.
Varying hospitals have had cases of medical staff being punched, verbally and physically attacked, and even other cases of staff being thrown to the ground. According to the National Library of Medicine, 77 percent of healthcare employees experienced workplace violence in 2021. And in the beginning of 2022, an analysis of Press Ganey's National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators showed that an average of two nurses were assaulted every hour.
Mosaic Life Care [MLC] is a chain of hospitals where caregivers are being violently attacked and threatened as they recently noted a dramatic increase in workplace violence. Mosaic Life Care operates hospitals in Northwest Missouri's Albany, Maryville and St. Joseph regions.
Mike Poore is the CEO at MLC, and he said recently there’s been several cases of nurses, doctors and other employees experiencing everything from verbal abuse to actual physical harming.
“We had a doctor that was, you know, hit in the face, knocked to the ground. I mean, we actually have video of the whole instance and it’s just surprising. Unprovoked,” said Poore.
Poore said although many of his employees view the violence as “part of the job”, he’s encouraging his staff to press charges if they feel necessary.
“We’re here to take care of patients and heal patients and get them better and back to normal as quickly as possible,” Poore said. “But we’re going to do everything in our power to make it a safe place to work. So I want the staff to understand that they have our support and our backing.”
Tommye Austin is the BJC HealthCare Chief Nursing Officer. She said their hospitals have seen an increase in violence partly due to an influx in patients with behavioral health issues.
These are patients who have been discharged from personal care homes or behavioral health care centers to be treated for emergency care. Austin said an issue with this is that a lot of the time, they cannot return back to these clinics.
“You just see an abundance of individuals who need placement, but are pretty much dumped at a hospital,” Austin says.
Another contributing factor to this overall increase in violence is the nursing workforce, which is experiencing an overall shortness in staffing and currently consists of a much younger generation. Michael Lauer is BJC HealthCare’s Executive Director of Security. He said these nurses are being trained to treat people medically, but don’t know yet how to properly deal with people behaviorally.
“What we’re increasingly seeing is that a lot of our patient population has behavioral health issues, or personality disorder issues, and [nurses] are encountering patients who are difficult to manage,” Lauer said. “We train them to deal with medical implications and indications, and they’re dealing with other mental health issues that they’re not trained for.”
Austin said it’s important for hospital staff to understand that each patient is different, and patients with varying mental health and behavioral issues need different kinds of care.
“I think that’s where having a younger population or a younger generation of nurses has made it somewhat challenging because they just don’t have the experience and knowledge to deal with these patients,” Austin said.
To address this increase in workplace violence, BJC HealthCare is working to create a care plan that will allow employees to work with patients having de-escalation tactics in mind. Lauer said another thing they are working on is encouraging communication between the hospitals and nursing staff so there’s not a stigma created around the violence.
“So if [nurses are] encountering things they have not seen before or if they’re encountering patients that are difficult, that if they share those stories with their nurse leadership teams, we can develop tools and plans to be able to protect them within the environment,” Lauer said.
Lauer said BJC HealthCare will also begin introducing more behavioral health resources to their teams so they can provide a care plan that not only treats the patients medically but deals with other ancillary issues that are causing behavioral issues.
In addition to extra resources, BJC HealthCare has installed a weapons detection system at every single one of their emergency departments. Throughout the next year and a half, they plan to provide systemized, standardized training for around 31,000 employees across all 14 hospitals and other medical centers under BJC.
Austin said although there’s been this increase, it’s important to keep in mind that medical staff is there to help people and expects others to give employees that respect they give them.
“No one goes into this profession wanting to be a target every day,” Austin said. “So I think one of things that we can emphasize with anything that we share is that being respectful to people goes both ways. We expect our staff to be courteous, respectful, kind, compassionate and we would expect people, when they come into the organization, to treat our staff the same way.”