Social media pictures surfaced after a southern Indiana man ransacked a nurses station. Dr. Jason Smith and the CEO of Kentucky Nurses Association address concerns.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Workplace safety has been at the of mind for healthcare staff working in Louisville’s medical district.
Friday morning, Louisville Metro Police confirmed they arrested a patient from southern Indiana who had a combative outburst and ransacked a nurses’ station at Jewish Hospital. Officials charged 50-year-old Vincent Armstrong with third-degree assault and criminal mischief.
UofL Healthcare chief medical officer Dr. Jason Smith didn’t specifically address this incident due to an ongoing investigation, or any other particular events similar to this one, but did say that situations like these have been going on for decades for multiple reasons.
“One of the problems in the healthcare industry, and in particular, is we’ve got folks dealing with medical problems that may lead them to not be in complete control of their own faculties,” Smith said. “So you may take a patient that’s completely reasonable, and we have because of anesthesia or medications or their disease process or their injury, they find themselves acting in ways that they would never act like if they had their faculties about them.”
Smith said the hospital has tried to increase overall security presence, reduce the number of entryways into the hospital, and reeducate family members and patients around acceptable behavior. All measures ensure staff stay safe and feel comfortable going to work.
“We’ve been working on developing long-standing security plans,” Smith said.
But the CEO of the Kentucky Nurses Association Delanor Manson said there are 93,000 nurses in Kentucky who are 53.3% of the healthcare workforce.
She said nurses do not report to doctors but rather to other nurses. Manson also stated that any healthcare system with nurses can use other methods before the next dangerous situation occurs.
“Nurses have concerns about being in an unsafe environment,” she said. “I know that there are many organizations that are engaged in collecting data and changing their environments, but they’re not sharing the data with nurses or the other healthcare professionals.”
Smith says some violent instances simply aren’t reported.
“I think oftentimes it goes under reported across the United States for the very reason that the people delivering this care are empathetic towards another individual,” Smith said. “And they don’t want to press charges. They don’t want to report incidents and we find that difficulty today.”
Smith said UofL will back any employee who wants to press charges.
Manson said that process takes time and nothing happens after they fill out the incident report.
“Then other nurses told me that they just really thought that being exposed to violence was part of the job,” she said. “It’s not part of the job. So we need to start with nursing schools to help that to be part of the curriculum. To make sure that nursing students and faculty understand it is not part of the job to be a nurse, to be harmed, and that they should have an expectation that wherever they’re going to work, there’s going to be a safe environment.”
Several pictures of Friday’s incident did appear on social media. Smith said there are rules that could be violated by doing this.
He says when images from a hospital setting float around on social media, it could be unintentionally exposing other patients’ data or staff members’ data who are not involved in the situation. He hopes staff can have a frank conversation about the possible risks.
“When we take pictures of nursing units with medical records displayed or rooms with patients in them, that violates a whole bunch of rights that we hold sacred and we can’t do things like that,” he said. “Now, that’s the bottom line regarding putting stuff out from a healthcare organization on social media, I mean, when we talk about things like that I’m more than welcome to open dialog, and I want to find a way to do this. Because, again, I am subject to these rules the same as anybody else is.”
Manson says there needs to be more room for hospital staff to discuss problems with leadership and see actual results from those discussions.
“I think the balance is we have to make it so that it’s safe for nurses to talk to their leaders, their managers, to report, and for them to have an expectation that something is going to happen when they make these reports,” Manson said. “That’s number one. Number two, it is really important that every health care provider is aware of HIPAA and not sharing information that would divulge specific information about patients and also to meet the requirements of that particular organization that they work for.”
The call to action here is ensuring employees, like nurses, are kept from danger and feel comfortable speaking out.