REVEALED: 4500 nurses attacked last year
Assaults on healthcare staff on the rise in NI
The Director of the Royal College of Nursing in Northern Ireland has revealed around 4500 nurses were attacked last year.
Janice Smyth said the organisation is calling for a withdrawal policy to be implemented, to protect staff from abusive patients.
Speaking ahead of the organisation's annual conference in Belfast this weekend, Janice told Downtown Cool FM assaults on staff are unacceptable:
"There is statistics that show that that is a growing problem and I think last year, there was about four and a half thousand attacks on nurses," she said.
"You're asking me as the Director of the Royal College of Nursing do I think enough is being done about that, I would say to you absolutely not.
"I'm really concerned that society has got itself to a place now and indeed our health service has, where we just accept that nurses are going to be abused when they're at work, some of the cases are truly shocking."
The conference will see 5000 delegates travel to Belfast to discuss issues facing the nursing profession in a five day event.
Janice says introducing policies to protect nurses from abusive patients will be high on the agenda:
"I think...we do need to have a withdrawal of care policy and that there has to be circumstances where if they (patients) do not respect healthcare professionals and staff who are trying to care for them and do their best for them, then I think there comes a point in time when employers have a duty to say to patients that there care will be withdrawn if they don't desist from abusing staff."
She added: "I think that it is a societal issue.
"I don't think it's acceptable in any circumstance that any nurse or indeed healthcare worker or any person at work, that they're subjected to violence either verbal or physical.
"I think there are more cases coming to court than there would've been in the past.
"I think there was a great reluctance on particularly nurses to go to court and make a case for people who had been verbally or physically abusive to them.
"It may just be as a result of the increasing numbers of cases but certainly we have had more involvement in more cases recently than we would have had in the past."