Employees at Minnesota hospital had safety worries
Complaints go back to year before shooting
Last year, nurses in Minnesota asked M Health Fairview administrators to provide better protection in the hospitals' parking areas.
They described “unsafe and mindboggling obstacles” getting to and from their cars, hourlong waits between shuttles and security escorts and being dropped at “deserted parking lots in the dark without overhead lights.”
Some employees were hiring taxis to get from the hospital to their cars, they told management. Administrators ignored the request. On Monday night, a doctor was shot in the head in Fairview Southdale hospital's parking garage in an attempted robbery as he walked to his car. The assailant had not been arrested as of Wednesday morning.
The attack is the latest to expose the daily dangers hospital workers face in their employer designated parking areas and how violence against health care workers on the job has long been overlooked by hospital administrators, regulators and lawmakers.
An investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published in August detailed how hospitals across the country fail to adequately protect employees from violence in parking
garages, opting not to monitor cameras, improve lighting or offer employees feasible escorts to their cars and take other safety precautions.
“M Health Fairview was not interested in discussions regarding parking ramp safety when we proposed this in 2019 and never provided any counterproposal,” Cassy Fogale, with the Minnesota Nurses Association, told the Journal Sentinel.
A spokeswoman from M Health confirmed that Fairview did not take up the issue of parking safety at Southdale or at Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center during contract negotiations with the nurses union last year.
M Health Fairview did, however, upgrade the lighting in the parking structures in 2019, the spokeswoman said.
"Workplace safely has been a shared concern for all of our hospital staff administrators," said Joe Campbell, spokesman for M Health. "We all share the same common objective of making our hospitals safe places to work and receive care."
Campbell said prior to the shooting, there had been no incidents of assaults or other serious crimes in the parking garage or outside of Fairview Southdale Hospital in all of 2020.
On Tuesday, the hospital’s vice president of system operations told employees that the hospital was beefing up security and that additional improvements were in the works, according to an email obtained by the Journal Sentinel.
“In light of recent events, we understand that employees across our system have questions about safety and security measures in place for our patients, visitors, and staff,” Paul Onufer wrote in a memo to staff.
Onufer said the security team was increasing security patrols in the parking structures, adding to officer presence outside the buildings, updating security technology and replacing cameras, among other things.
He encouraged employees to call for an escort to get to their cars — and be prepared to wait, he said.
“Note that, as a result of recent events, we are experiencing significant increases in request for escorts and we may experience some longer wait times.”
Wait times were the main complaint about escort programs across the country, the Journal Sentinel’s investigation found. Dozens of nurses told the news organization that it’s not reasonable to expect them to wait 20 minutes or more — sometimes an hour — to get to their cars after working 12-hour shifts.
M Health Fairview representatives said employees at Southdale Hospital seldom use the escort program, citing just eight requests in the last 12 months.
The program is widely used at the University of Minnesota Medical Campus, where the average wait time for a walking escort was less than 2 minutes for the more than 1,100 requests thus far in 2020, M Health Fairview officials said.
The Journal Sentinel also found that many state and local lawmakers and regulators have not addressed the issue, failing to pass legislation requiring workplace violence prevention programs and neglecting to enforce lighting codes.
Lighting is universally considered one the most important deterrents to crime in parking areas, yet hospital workers across the country reported the garages where they park for work are shadowy and dimly lit. The Journal Sentinel hired a safety consultant to examine eight parking structures at hospitals in the Milwaukee area. He found safety shortcomings and lighting levels below industry standards at every one of them.
Furthermore, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is charged with protecting the nation’s workforce, has done little to enforce the requirement that hospitals, like all employers, provide safe workplaces, the investigation found. The agency’s guidelines for parking-area safety are voluntary.
“There has definitely been a delay in acknowledging the problem of violence in hospitals,” said Rick Fuentes, spokesman for the Minnesota Nurses Association. “(Administrators) try to say ‘It doesn’t happen here. It only happens in troubled neighborhoods.’ That couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Edina police announced a $5,000 reward Tuesday for information that leads to the arrest and charging of the man responsible for the shooting of the doctor. Police provided limited information about the incident other than that it was an attempted robbery and happened around 9 p.m. on Monday on the second floor of the hospital’s parking structure. They said the victim, 45, survived the shooting and was able to describe the suspect and said he didn’t know him. He was released from the hospital early Tuesday.
Police said there had been a hit-andrun at the garage earlier this year and a handful of assaults, burglaries and thefts in the area around the hospital in the last couple of years. The hospital is in an upscale neighborhood adjacent to two shopping malls.