A nurse is recovering from her wounds after being attacked at the General Hospital of Vancouver on March 13, in what the nursing union calls the last example of violence against nurses in the workplace.
A spokesman for Vancouver’s coastal health confirmed that a medical care provider and another patient were attacked in the hospital that day, and the attacked patient was treated there while the nurse is now recovering at home.
Adriane Gear, president of the BC Nurses Union, said the attack occurred in the Hospital Psychiatry Unit at the Hospital and asked for more security workers there.
“A horrible incident took place on March 13,” he said. “One of our members … a new nurse in his career, was strangled unconscious and had to be dragged behind the nursing station to a safe place for his colleagues.”
“The person who strangled her was a patient.”
Gear says that the psychiatry hospitalization units in VGH are in a separate building, and security personnel take several minutes to arrive from the emergency department.
“That is not acceptable,” he said.
“These are patients … Some of them have very worrying behaviors,” he added. “They have well -documented violence stories, and the employer needs to do more to keep their staff and other safe patients.”
Number of nurses attacks
In recent months, Gear pointed out several attacks on nurses in hospitals for patients and asked for more security officers in the workplaces to prevent nurses from abandoning the profession.
These officers are staff members who are trained to anticipate and dismiss violence in medical care environments, according to the province.
Gear said there was a stabbing in VGH only a few months ago, as well as a case in which a man who wielded the machete threatened the staff at the Eagle Ridge hospital in Port Moody.
“What will you take? Are you going to take one of my members who really kill at work so that some substantive changes take place?” The president of the Union asked.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Health said in a statement that it has approximately 750 full -time equivalent security guards working in 30 medical care facilities from last spring.
They added that the ministry is looking for opportunities to expand to additional hospital facilities.
CBC News has contacted Worksafebc, the workplace regulator of the province, to find out if it was notified of the attack.
