No one saw she had me hostage

SHELLEY Pearce, who works as a nurse at a large district general hospital on the south coast, told how she was “taken hostage” by a patient.

The A&E worker, from Portsmouth, has also been kicked, punched, spat at and headbutted in the course of her job.

She said: “I was working as a healthcare support worker and I didn’t know the patient from Adam.

“The patient was detoxing from alcohol and didn’t have mental capacity and wanted to leave.

“I stood in her way and she smashed something, held a sharp piece of hard plastic against my throat and took me to the lift.

“I pressed the lift alarm button and shouted I was with a patient in the lift as no staff had seen what happened, so didn’t know I was missing.”

Shelley went on: “We encounter aggressions every day. We need better systems of raising the alarm and protecting our safety. There is security in hospitals, but only if you can get away to summon them. “Half of the patients that come to A&E [do so] because they can’t get mental health support. We have to think, are they detoxing, are they suffering from a head injury, have they been searched, do they have a knife? “All of these things have happened in an acute hospital, not a mental health unit. “Previously, when I worked on mental health wards, you had training and support. We had a pin on us to pull to call security and we were trained in de-escalation. “We knew the patient, so we knew the potential triggers.” She added: “We’re expecting staff to work under pressure and there are only so many beds. I work shifts when I’m the only permanent nurse on the ward.”