B.C., Ontario take measures to better protect staff
The British Columbia Nurses’ Union (BCNU) and British Columbia Ministry of Health have announced they plan to reduce violence at health-care sites in the province by pumping a combined $2 million into a violence prevention program.
"Health-care workers on the whole have a higher percentage of being assaulted than police officers, which is a really sad fact," said Gayle Duteil, president of BCNU, adding it happens every day across a variety of work settings across the province.
"Unfortunately, it came to our attention with a number of vicious assaults against health-care workers, nurses and doctors and we just couldn’t let it continue."
Jointly with the Ministry of Health, BCNU has outlined the four most troublesome sites in the province to focus the initiative on. But there are about 700 sites across the province where violent attacks are experienced often — with another six sites identified as high risk — that need to be addressed right away.
"We are going to chip away one at a time and we are now going to (be) linking with the government and the health authority on the remaining six sites that we’ve identified," said Duteil.
In due time, these types of initiatives do work, according to B.C.’s Ministry of Health. For example, the ministry and health partners have been working to reduce violence in the workplace with investments like a $37-million health and safety action plan launched in 2011.
"Our efforts to reduce incidents of violence appear to be paying off. Over the last three years, we’ve seen the number of ‘code whites’ dropping from 4,307 to 3,749 — despite health authorities treating more and more patients each year," said the ministry’s spokesperson.
"Code whites" refers to a common database and a standard user format established by health authorities — the Workplace Health Indicator Tracking and Evaluation (WHITE) — for collecting occupational health and safety data across all health authorities.
The WHITE.net database shows 2,789 violent incidents reported from across the province in 2012 and 2,599 incidents reported in 2014. Of those reported in 2014, 47 per cent and 27 per cent were in long-term care, said the spokesperson.
Violence can come from a number of different sources including patients, relatives and co-workers within the health department. Unfortunately, patients with mental health issues or substance abuse tend to become violent, said Duteil.
"And occasionally, domestic violence entering the workplace is an issue also," said Leon Genesove, chief physician at Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, adding workplace violence is a serious hazard in the health-care sector in Ontario as well.
Ontario gets onboard
Recently, Ontario’s Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Health joined forces by establishing a leadership table on workplace violence prevention to address the dire problem.
"Workplace cause 10 per cent of lost-time injuries in the health-care sector, it is specifically in hospitals (that) nurses bear the major brunt of injuries from workplace violence," said Genesove. "We are focusing initially on nurses in hospitals and then expanding to other health-care workers in the broader health-care sector and we want to get a broad range of partners engaged in the leadership table."
Similar to B.C., the Ontario ministries joined forces to combat violence because change just isn’t coming quickly enough.
"We need healthy health-care workers and safe health-care workplaces," said Genesove.
Legislation came into effect in 2010 in Ontario to fight workplace violence against health-care workers, he noted.
"It’s (now) clear that enforcement alone of the legislation will not solve the problem completely and we need leadership from the people involved in the health-care system."
Back in 2005, Statistics Canada found that 31 per cent of nurses reported were being physically assaulted at work, with 25 per cent of the assault or abuse coming from a patient or visitor. Fifty-five per cent of the assault and abuse came from co-workers.
"The stress and mental injury related to a particular incident can be quite traumatic to individuals; both the physical injury and the resulting trauma afterwards can be quite difficult," said Genesove.
The emotional and mental trauma followed by an attack needs to be dealt with accordingly, because violence breeds violence.
"If they are injured due to violence in the workplace, they are no longer available to provide their high level of services, so that’s a huge problem for the system," he said.
Besides addressing the ergonomic and musculoskeletal issues that are the most prominent physical workplace injuries, preventative measures, victim fallout issues and investigating the attack all need to be combined into a strategy to address the ongoing negative trend, said Genesove.
The roundtable plans to develop recommendations and action items for four working groups to address various elements of the problem at hand. The groups will include leadership and accountability, resources and intervention, communication and knowledge translation, and evaluation and reporting, he said.
"All places are required to have a violence prevention policy and a violence prevention program."
