While the incidents of occupational violence towards staff at the health service decreased last year, it was still much too frequent.
There were 51 incidents across the emergency department and medical wards at ERH in 2020, down from the 118 seen in 2019.
“The behaviour towards staff is troubling and concerning for us,” ERH chief executive Nick Bush said.
Verbal abuse was the most common, however last year three staff members were injured, some seriously.
“Anytime a staff member is injured is a time of concern for us,” Mr Bush said.
“We want to look after their welfare and set up processes and systems so it doesn’t happen again.”
2020 saw the COVID-19 pandemic affect everyone in some way, mostly for the worse, however one silver lining is it may be partly responsible for lower incidences of abuse.
“We’ve seen a reduction in occupational violence towards our staff, potentially as there were less people in town and less people in and around our health service,” Mr Bush said.
“It could also be, across COVID, people were caring and looking after each other. The stress was back a bit and the behaviours were better.”
To address the growing number of incidents last year, ERH put an extra doctor on night duty, something Mr Bush said may have contributed to the drop in figures.
“If we can get people treated as quickly as we can in the emergency department, we do know that reduces the verbal abuse towards staff,” he said.
“We’ve put in a fair bit of training into how we can de-escalate confrontation between aggrieved patients and family members before they get to that level.
“We’ve also recruited three senior doctors to start in the emergency department in the next few weeks.
“We’re trying to increase the level of medical support to provide leadership with patients and management of care to try and diffuse situations.”
Mr Bush encouraged the community to be as caring as they could towards the staff who were endeavouring to provide the care they needed.
“We’re in unprecedented times of demand and times of COVID-19 are very different,” he said.
“It is difficult to get the care to people as quickly as they would like and we would like but if they could be caring towards our staff in the same way they expect our staff to care for them.”
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