No health-care worker should face threats of violence
The most important issues are often suppressed and not talked about.
I learned this in 2007 as an advocate against Canada’s asbestos industry, when all political parties in Ottawa and Quebec supported the industry and closed their eyes to the terrible harm asbestos was causing to workers in Canada and populations overseas.
By publicly challenging political leaders, we got the Quebec government to stop financing the asbestos industry. It closed down in 2012; a national ban finally came into effect in 2018.
A similar awakening is happening right now, as the silence is finally being broken around violence against health-care workers. Following groundbreaking studies in 2017 and 2019, a forthcoming book by researchers Margaret Keith and James Brophy called “Code White: Sounding the Alarm on Violence against Health Care Workers” (Sept. 1, 2021) makes it impossible to ignore how we have permitted and normalized a widespread practice of violence against health-care workers, particularly those working in long-term-care facilities and on emergency wards.
The facts are disturbing, but necessary to face. Health-care workers experience the highest level of workplace violence of all occupational groups. Sixty-one per cent of registered nurses experienced serious workplace violence, according to a 2017 survey by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions. (Contrast that to an average of 15 per cent in other industries.) Sixty-eight per cent of registered practical nurses and personal support workers reported having experienced at least one incident in the past year of physical violence, and 20 per cent had experienced at least nine such assaults.
Shockingly, health-care workers who are subjected to violence face retaliation and dismissal from management if they speak up openly about violence they have experienced on the job. The problem is suppressed. The violence continues and grows.
Keith and Brophy call our attention to a major cause of the violence: underfunding of the health-care system, which leads to understaffing and inadequate resources, as well as a shortage of mental health services.
Overworked health-care staff are rushed and exhausted. Their increased workloads make it impossible to meet the human and emotional needs of the residents. Long-term-care facilities too often resemble warehouses where residents are treated like objects on an assembly line. In privatized facilities, profit is prioritized over health.
Under such appalling conditions where their basic human needs and dignity are disregarded, residents become angry. Who would not? They strike out at the people close to them — the healthcare workers who are as much victims of this dehumanizing system as the residents.
This is also a gendered and racial issue. Eighty-five per cent of health-care workers are women, and many are racialized or recent immigrants. Fifty per cent of hospital jobs and 60 per cent of longterm-care jobs are part-time, making the workers economically insecure.
No worker should be subjected to threats, violence, and sexual and racial harassment. Yet this is the reality experienced by health-care workers. Supervisors frequently treat the abuse suffered as just being part of the job.
We must not allow our governments to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing and abuse. Like with asbestos, we must break the silence and demand political leadership.
The federal government shares in funding health services. It must set a clear, enforceable standard that violence, sexual and racial harassment, threats and other forms of abuse against workers in health-care facilities will not be permitted, and management will be held responsible for taking action to ensure a workplace free of such abuse.
All provincial leaders must demand and support a national plan of action that upholds the human rights of healthcare workers and those they serve. Political leaders must end the underfunding of health care.
Health-care workers can only do so much. They’ve been there for us — now we need to be there for them.