The most violent job in Washington state isn’t being a police officer or a security guard. It’s working as a nurse’s aide.
Seattle public radio station KUOW-FM made that finding as part of an investigative series on workplace safety airing this week. The station found that violence strikes health care workers in Washington at six times the state average for all workplaces, and frontline caregivers in emergency rooms and psychiatric wards get assaulted even more than that.
The single most violent workplace in the state is Western State Hospital, where criminal defendants are taken when they are found incompetent to stand trial. Workers at psychiatric hospitals are assaulted on the job more often than anybody else — 60 times more than the average worker in Washington state.
KUOW also found that even though working on steel towers remains one of the nation’s most dangerous jobs, right up there with commercial fishing, line workers for Seattle City Light and other northwest power companies aren’t strapped in while they climb such towers. Instead, they only strap safety ropes to their harnesses once they’ve climbed up to where they’ll be working — around 200 feet above ground in some cases.
Though several line worker deaths from falls were reported in other states last year, none has been reported in Washington in the past decade.
James Robinson, president of the union for many workers at Western State Hospital, says there were 313 assaults there last year — a drop of nearly 30 percent in assaults per patient-care hour, though union officials also note that many incidents go unreported because of the time required to fill out paperwork about assaults.
At some hospitals, such as Tacoma General, emergency room security is obviously a concern. Everyone must pass through a metal detector to enter the ER, no matter the time of day. It’s one of many measures Pierce County’s biggest hospital has taken to keep patients from attacking hospital staff. Other anti-violence measures are more subtle. Much of the staff is trained in how to pacify agitated people. Even the colors and spaces of the ER’s new waiting area were designed to soothe injured, stressed out, impatient patients.
If that doesn’t work, some exam rooms have additional security measures — such as a metal gate that can come clanging down to protect medical equipment from violent patients.
Nurses’ unions want hospitals to do more to protect their workers, like more hands-on training on how to avoid or defuse violent situations.
Nan Yragui, a psychologist with the Department of Labor and Industries, studies workplace violence. She said budget cuts to the health care safety net have made emergency rooms nationwide more violence-prone.
“When patients can’t get services they need, they end up going to the emergency department,” she said. “So more of the severely mentally ill are going to the emergency department, and then that makes that group of nurses more at risk because they’re getting more exposure.”
