Editorial: Medical workers shouldn't have to face workplace violence

Hospitals are in a pinch when it comes to staffing.

It isn’t even just hospitals. Anyone looking to hire workers in the medical field is crunched. Nursing homes, clinics, schools, prisons. If you need nurses or techs, it’s not an easy time.

For many places, this is a financial problem to solve. Workers are looking for money. They are looking for benefits. They want some assurances, and a lot of them have a price tag. After the coronavirus pandemic led to a culling of already-thin herds of medical workers, it isn’t surprising.

But there is another area that might help improve the odds.

Safety.

The medical field is not just a desk job. It’s work that requires contact with the public, and sometimes that contact is dangerous.

“If you look at it, some of it is just verbal abuse. Some of it is physical abuse, where someone strikes, punches, kicks bites a health care worker,” said Michael Huss, head of corporate security and employee safety at Highmark Health. “Probably the most arrests we make are on aggravated assaults on health care workers.”

There aren’t a lot of jobs where being bitten by the people you are trying to serve is a potentially everyday occurrence, but not everyone works in an emergency department.

Deliberate actions or threats of violence and brandishing of weapons are becoming regular problems in medical facilities. The fact is, medical employees need to be protected.

While many hospitals are upping security, we have to realize that will come with a cost added to already sky-high medical bills. Government intervention such as the federal Safety from Violence for Healthcare Employees Act introduced in 2022 might be a way to emphasize the seriousness of actions.

We already do this with police officers or corrections officers. An assault on law enforcement is addressed at a different level not because the person doing that job is better than other people but because the job is so important that there has to be a line drawn.

Medical workers should be afforded similar protection — especially considering how many of the injuries are to some of the lowest-paid workers, such as nursing assistants.

Will a law like this make more people sign up to be nurses or assistants? Maybe. Maybe not. It certainly wouldn’t hurt, and it might just show the ones still showing up to work that their lives are worth protecting.