Workplace violence bill clears the House
Bill co-sponsor Jared Huffman calls issue a 'national problem'
Nurses across the county, including hundreds who work at local hospitals, cheered the passage of HR 1309 in the House of Representatives last week. The bill is aimed at curbing violence that occurs in the workplace for health care and social service workers.
“It’s a national problem,” North Coast U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) said Monday of the bill, of which he was a co-sponsor. “This issue crosses all sorts of political lines. This affects health workers (and) social service workers in every community.”
He continued, “I hope (Sen. Mitch McConnell) sees a moral and political imperative to take it up,” when asked what the chances were of it being voted on in the Senate.
The bill was endorsed by National Nurses United, which bills itself as “the largest and fastest-growing union of registered nurses in the United States with more than 150,000 members.” The union is affiliated with the California Nurses Association, the union for nurses who work at St. Joseph and Redwood Memorial hospitals as well as other hospitals across the state.
“This legislation will hold our employers accountable, through federal OSHA, for having a prevention plan in place to stop workplace violence before it occurs,” said Zenei Cortez, a registered nurse and president of National Nurses United in a statement. “This is literally a life or death issue. Every moment we wait puts lives in jeopardy. We all deserve to feel safe in hospitals, clinics and social service settings, which should be places of healing.”
What will this mean for nurses at local hospitals who have spoken out about incidents of violence? Not much. That’s because California is a leader in workplace violence prevention and the bill is modeled off language implemented in 2018 in the state, said Lesley Ester, a registered nurse at St. Joseph Hospital and a local representative for the California Nurses Association.
“(HR 1309) mirrors what California was a leader on in terms of regulations,” Ester said Sunday. “It wouldn’t make any substantial changes in California and at our hospital, because we already have this regulatory language.”
But that doesn’t mean more can be done to curb the epidemic of violence against health care workers, she added. That’s why it is an issue the California Nurses Association has brought to the bargaining table. The contract for local nurses at St. Joseph hospitals expired in September, and it is in ongoing negotiations similar to the position of their colleagues who are members of the National Union for Healthcare Workers, which is dealing with a contract that ended in April.
Randee Litten, an emergency room nurse who could not be reached for this article, told Yahoo! recently that working in health care is like “combat medicine.”
“It’s the unknown,” she told the online news site. “It’s not knowing if you walk into a room if you’re safe or not. You don’t know if this patient has weapons on them, you don’t know if this patient wants to hurt you.”
A recent survey found that 41% of registered nurses are “victims of bullying, incivility or other forms of workplace violence” while another 27% “say they’ve witnessed workplace violence.”
St. Joseph Hospital said it is committed to worker safety in a statement, although it refrained from commenting on the active legislation HR 1309.
“St. Joseph Health, Humboldt County remains steadfast in our commitment to ensuring a culture of safety for every employee, patient and family member who enter our hospitals,” the hospital said in a statement provided by hospital spokesman Christian Hill. ” That is why we continue to adhere to policies and programs established by Cal/ OSHA to address workplace violence. The safety of our employees is a top priority and we take seriously the responsibility to ensure a work place that is free of all forms of violence.”
Ester called the current workplace prevention plan from St. Joseph Hospital “weak” because it did not directly address staffing issues and lacked specific guidelines for how quickly a nurse who was physically assaulted.
“They are supposed to address the staffing issue,” she said noting it was a particularly big problem in the emergency room and the childbirth center. “You make us safer by having proper staffing.”
Last week, St. Joseph CEO Roberta Luskin-Hawk told the Times-Standard “the ratio for nurses are very clear and we are completely compliant with that.”
The hospital did not respond to a question about whether there would be any changes made to the workplace violence prevention plan in place.
A proposal offered in July as part of negotiations included requests for “posted expectations of visitors and patients” among some of the requests the hospital address in its workplace violence prevention plan. Ester said even before July, last fall colleagues with NUHW asked for the signs.
“This is an everyday, every shift occurrence,” she said. “… I have been in rooms of nurses where the question is ‘Have you ever been verbally or physically assaulted?’ and every nurse raises their hand. It might be something that rolls off their backs. It might be somebody with a little dementia who grabs onto them very hard, but they let that go because they know the patient doesn’t have full faculties. But I don’t know a nurse that hasn’t been assaulted.”
A recent survey found that 41% of registered nurses are “victims of bullying, incivility or other forms of workplace violence” while another 27% “say they’ve witnessed workplace violence.”