Health care worker safety at issue

Forum highlights the daily peril they face in hospitals, elsewhere

— Sherri Drake, an emergency room nurse at Backus Hospital, dealt this week with a troubled patient who revealed he was in possession of three knives.

Hospital staff disarmed him without anyone getting hurt.

Nevertheless, incidents that imperil health care workers, including nurses, EMTs and paramedics as well as visiting nurses and home health aides occur daily at hospitals and other locations “everywhere,” Drake said Friday during a roundtable discussion of the topic at Three Rivers Community College.

Hosted by U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, who has introduced federal legislation that would address the problem, the event brought together Julie Su, the acting U.S. secretary of labor, U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials, educators and representatives of health care groups.

Su’s appearance came three months after the death of Joyce

Grayson, a visiting nurse whose body was found in the basement of a Willimantic halfway house for sex offenders. Grayson visited a patient there the day she was killed.

Su said OSHA has opened an investigation into Grayson’s death, which she said has “shed light on the challenges health care workers face.” She said the agency is issuing the stiffest penalties in its history in cases in which workers have been injured but is hampered by the lack of a workplace violence prevention standard for the health care industry.

“We don’t have a speed limit we can enforce,” was the way Jeff Erskine, OSHA’s deputy administrator for New England, put it.

Passed by the House in 2021, Courtney’s bill, the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, would accelerate adoption of an OSHA standard that requires employers to implement violence prevention plans. Without congressional intervention, it could take OSHA years to issue such a standard, according to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su’s appearance came three months after the death of Joyce Grayson, a visiting nurse whose body was found in the basement of a Willimantic halfway house for sex offenders. Grayson visited a patient there the day she was killed.

“We need that OSHA standard ... like, yesterday,” Drake, president of the nurses’ union at Backus, said.

She called for the use of metal detectors to screen patients and for nurses and health care staff to be trained to protect themselves. Patients’ charts, she said, should carry information about any danger they might present and such information should be retrievable in the event they re-enter care following their discharge.

Courtney said opposition to the use of metal detectors and other technology like “buzzers and alarms” has been based on cost, a position he said a congressional study has refuted.

“We know there’s a cost to doing nothing,” Su said.

Kelly Reardon, a New London attorney hired by the Grayson family, also took part in Friday’s roundtable, saying her clients were concerned about the lack of extensive background checks on visiting nurses’ patients and the lack of “risk assessment” by home health care employers.

Reardon later said her firm has been waiting for authorities to criminally charge the suspect in Grayson’s death — the patient Grayson saw the day she was killed — before filing a civil lawsuit. She said the suit could target Grayson’s employer, New England Home Care, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Elara Caring, and other entities.