Attacks on public workers increase

CLASSROOM assistants, care home staff and support workers have been violently assaulted more than 40,000 times in the last decade, a study has revealed.

Unison’s annual Violence at Work survey was released yesterday showing a huge rise of vicious attacks against public service and local authority workers since 2006.

The number of people assaulted has jumped from 20,000 to 40,000, and is the highest the union has ever seen.

It is now calling for employers and the government to address the problem before it continues to get worse.

The report showed that care workers experience twice the national average risk of assault while for nurses it is four times that.

School assistants are also suffering from high level assaults, which can range from threatening behaviour, verbal threats and physical attacks.

Unison also found that 83 per cent of workers within the voluntary sector said that their employer regarded violence as part of the job. The study highlighted a significant increase of recorded violent incidents within local authorities, rising from 13,206 to 17,605 in the past year alone.

aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling were among the councils which reported a large increase.

Scott Donohue, Unison chair of health and safety committee, said: ‘Violence against public service workers has increased, with significant increases against local authority workers. We cannot ignore a doubling of the figures over ten years.

‘It is also reasonable to make the correlation between the swingeing cuts to councils and increase in violence to council workers.

‘Staff tell us if you have to wait longer, or the service you need is no longer available, it’s being taken out on those working face to face with the public. councils should fully implement the Scottish centre for Healthy Working Lives guidelines, in order that we can make the level of violent assaults fall.’