Written by Amy Rock for Campus Safety magazine
A patient enters a Texas teaching hospital and under supervision, a nursing student starts the patient’s IV. The patient’s significant other doesn’t like that she is in discomfort. He pulls a knife out of his pocket and threatens the fresh-faced nursing student. Although this was the first instance of hospital workplace violence endured by Rhonda Collins during her honorable nursing career, it certainly wasn’t the last.
“I’ve been punched, I’ve been bit — I’ve had all of those incidents happen over the years,” Collins said in an interview with Campus Safety. “I look back and we all were just like, ‘Well, that’s just our patient and that’s what we do.’”
Therein lies part of the problem, Collins says: nurses rationalizing violent patient behavior.
“There’s no other profession in the world where you got to work and go, ‘Well, if my customer bites me or punches me, that’s just part of the job.’ That doesn’t happen anywhere except in healthcare,” she continued. “However, I’m grateful to see that the conversation is changing. We’ve really got to talk about changing the culture of how we approach this.”
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