I add the qualifier in Dallas because you never know these days.
Actual assaults on healthcare workers continue.
Remember, there was a spate of them earlier this year. June specifically. At the time there were 6 healthcare workers wounded or killed, and two patients wounded or killed, in less than a week. Remember?
Remember how the hospital tightened its policies around badge usage, and being appropriate with the swipe part of the badge? Remember how some people didn’t even know this had happened? And people were dead.
Remember how hospitals tightened their security? Well, the last one didn’t last too long, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
These killings were on a labor ward. No moms or babies killed. Just the woman recently delivered being assaulted by the purported baby daddy and the nurse jumping in to stop him. With a bullet for her trouble, and the other nurse who tried to intervene also killed.
It was over in an instant.
But the reverberations echo, or should echo, through hospitals.
Hospitals are full of people who are stressed, and sometimes the stressed people have a gun.
I’ve always maintained that nursing is on the front line. Hell, I’ve created and written an entire blog about it.
Do you think we will get anything besides the boilerplate “Employee are our family” rhetoric?
A short-lived furor until it dies down. Pun definitely intended.
How many healthcare workers have to die on the front line?
Are some of the solutions to the tragedy costly? Metal detectors, security wanding of everyone, increased security. Absolutely it is going to cost money. But how do the hospitals stress their purportedly stretched thin budgets?
Or is this going to be just something that happens sometimes?
So sorry the nurse who was part of your actual family died protecting their patient. There was nothing that could have been done about it, it was a fluke. A chance roll of the dice.
Was it, though?
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 