Amid an Increase in Assaults on Healthcare Workers, a Missouri Hospital Is Giving Panic Buttons to Its Nurses and Doctors
A hospital in Missouri is getting 400 panic buttons for nurses and staff, due to assaults on their employees tripling amid the pandemic.
The Chief Nursing Officer at Cox Medical Center, Lynne Yaggy, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that “nurses are now making decisions about where they’re going to work based on their safety.”
“So we are looking for whatever tools we can find to make sure we can prevent that harm to them because they’re our most valuable resource,” Yaggy said. “All of our health care workers are.”
At Cox Medical Center, 123 assaults against hospital staff were reported last year — up from 40 in 2019. Injuries related to the assaults also increased from 17 to 78.
Yaggy went on to say that “everyone is escalated” amid the pandemic and “the frontline staff are the ones usually taking the brunt of that.”
Burnett then referenced a chief nursing executive’s comments in the Texas Tribune, where she said, “Our staff has been cursed at, screamed at, threatened with bodily harm and even had knives pulled on them.”
“I’m not sure it’s the political piece of it, more of the restrictions and when people are sick, coming into health care now [has] just accelerated their anxiety is what I would say,” Yaggy responded, adding that there is a lack of mental health resources.
“So our goal is to have a button… and I push that so I have immediate response from my security team,” she continued. “So we have many things in place for security. We have staff, we have de-escalation training and all those things. But the quicker I can get a response to a staff member, the better off they’re going to be.”
Brandei Clifton, the hospital’s communications manager, told NPR that the panic buttons were an effort to provide “extra protection” to their staff.
“That kind of raised a red flag that we need to get some extra protection in place,” Clifton said. “Until these buttons are implemented, right now, a nurse either has to call security on her phone or scream for help, and so this is an extra easy way they can get an immediate response.”
Watch above, via CNN.
