Nurses need protection from patient violence and abuse
Nurses practice under constant stress. Imagine your neighbor or friend, who is a nurse, coming home after an exhausting 12- or 16-hour work day, with a black eye and stitches above the eye. Do you wonder what she went through during her shift? Do you think about how she may feel scared to go back to work the next day? Does it make you worried that someday nurses will get tired of the abuse they take and stop being a nurse, which will prevent you from getting the care you need in the future?
Going to work as a registered nurse should not be dangerous, and yet it is. I am a registered nurse with more than 11 years of work experience and I have been victim to verbally and physically abusive patients and families.
Of 700 registered nurses surveyed in 2014, 76% reported being abused either verbally or physically at work. Of those that were physically assaulted, only 29% reported it to a superior. In another survey performed in 2018, 40% of over 900 nurses reported being bullied and harassed at work.
These nurses were harassed not only by patients but by other nurses as well as physicians and administrators. Abuse towards nurses has a domino effect, and can factor as a cause of nurse burnout. In 2018 62% of nurses reported feeling burnt out, not all from abuse but that was a contributing factor.
Nurses make up the largest segment of the healthcare workforce; however, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018) projects 1.1 million additional registered nurses are needed to avoid a national shortage. One occurrence of abuse towards a registered nurse or healthcare professional is one occurrence too many.
I am that registered nurse who went home with a bruise. In my case it was a foot-sized bruise on my chest, from being kicked by my patient. I struggled to take a deep breath for days because of the pain. I was that nurse who had to work through my fear of going back to work to possibly be attacked again. I had to decide if I wanted to continue with my nursing career because I was feeling burnt out, all within my first two years of nursing practice.
Laws need to be put into place to protect nurses from harm, or to assign greater weight to penalties for attacking health professionals in the line of duty. Registered nurses must not be prohibited by hospital policies, as some are, from pressing charges when attacked or harmed by a patient or others at work.
While some states, like California and Illinois, have passed legislation to specifically protect nurses, not all states have. Furthermore, of those states that have put laws in place, not all of them are protecting every nurse, but instead protecting specific groups of nurses based on where they work.
We need legislation that protects registered nurses, not just those who work in the emergency room or in mentalhealth settings. I didn’t work in those types of departments but I was still attacked. I did not report my incident 11 years ago, but I also didn’t feel like I should since the mentality among the nurses I worked with was that it was part of the job. Abuse in healthcare can happen anywhere and every nurse should be protected and feel safe to report incidents.
I ask that you protect the registered nurses who care for you. Contact your state legislators to enact legislation to protect all nurses in every state, because without more protection nurses will continue to get burned out and continue to leave nursing.