Seven nurses working in the Irish health system are assaulted every day, figures released at the INMO annual conference reveal.
The union will put the spotlight on this issue on Thursday by releasing testimony from one young nurse recounting how she was threatened by the mother of a sick child who told her she knew where she parked her car and “would kill me” when she went to it at the end of her shift.
The nurse who works in a busy Dublin paediatric hospital will tell delegates that aggression has “gone out of control” since Covid-19 started to increase pressure on emergency departments .
The nurse said he had experienced “numerous incidents” over six years but the one that stood out for her was when she asked a woman who had brought her child into the Emergency Department (ED), to leave a confined space where she was triaging another patient.
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She said this woman told her she knew where her car was sparked and would kill her.
Nurses have to tell the truth when asked how long the wait was likely to be in the ED but if they said five or six hours “you have six foot men towering over you screaming at you, pointing their fingers at you, calling you names , commenting on your personal appearance . The level of the aggression is out of control,” she added.
The nurse said that while senior staff in the hospital are supportive , generally there seemed to be an attitude out there among the public: “Oh you work in an A&E department. The person is very stressed because their child is sick”.
The ED nurse said this would not be accepted in other workplaces. “I do not go to my grocery shop and shout at whoever is on the till. The guards would be called immediately. I do not think we call the guards enough,” she said.
“I personally would feel guilty calling the guards because it is a children’s hospital . We are dealing with children. Should I be adding that stress to the parent? But at the end of the day I have been verbally and emotionally abused at work”.
She said colleagues talked about this on a daily basis because “there is always one or more staff members who have been abused at work”.
‘Pressure cooker’
The nurse said if the wait time was more than four hours she was often afraid to make eye contact with people on the corridors.
“It is gone to the stage where I don’t feel safe in my workplace every day”.
This aggression was causing junior nurses to quit, she said.
“After any incident like that you reflect on how you presented yourself. You second guess yourself and if you do that continuously your confidence falls. Junior nurses don’t stay.
“A&E is a pressure cooker,” she said.
She said member of the public sometimes make “nasty horrible remarks” about nurses personal appearance.
“We are human, trying to do the best we can”.
The nurse said she believed the aggression was amplified when GPs stopped seeing patients during lockdown and more people ended up in emergency departments.
“I think it has increased and I think it is out of control. I do not feel safe in my workplace. I don’t want to work in that environment any more”.
The INMO said Irish nurses and midwives are dealing with an increasing amount of physical, verbal and sexual assaults in the work place. It said figures show that since the beginning of 2021, over 3,416 nurses had been assaulted – on average seven assaults per day.
The union said that the HSE’s own figures show as well as dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare staff faced 5,672 cases of verbal, physical, or sexual assault in the workplace.
A breakdown of the data shows that 4,763 incidents occurred in 2021, with a further 909 up to March 31st of this year.
“This means that frontline staff are being put at risk for conditions they are not responsible for,” said INMO general secretary, Phil Ní Sheaghdha.
Over 143 staff availed of the HSE Serious Physical Assault Scheme in 2021, which entitles workers to six months paid leave after an assault, according to the union.
