Last Tuesday, two psychiatric ward nurses at Harborview Medical Center were reportedly attacked by patients on the same day. This isn’t particularly unusual—psych ward nurses and other mental health caretakers often turn up in police reports. But the attacks raise a few questions about the safety of caregivers. Was Tuesday a freak outlier? Or are psych wards in need of greater security?
On May 3, at 8:08 a.m., Officer Alan Laina, Jr. of the East Precinct was dispatched to the hospital’s emergency room. According to the police report, at 6:00 a.m. a psychiatric ward nurse had “smelled an odor of burning coming from [a patient’s] bed.” When she went to check on the patient—who was in three-point restraints, leaving one arm free—she realized that he was “attempting to free himself by burning off one of his leg restraints with a cigarette lighter.”
The nurse told police that she grabbed the patient’s arm and ordered him to stop when “without warning [he] punched [her] in the right side of her face,” the report states.
When questioned by police, the patient, who only speaks Russian, said through a translator that he didn’t assault the nurse. The report notes that since the suspect was a psych patient, he couldn’t be arrested. Hospital security were notified to contact police when he is discharged.
Approximately 10 hours later, officers were dispatched again to Harborview’s emergency room in response to another reported patient attack on a nurse. The nurse explained to East Precinct officers Doug Raguso and Jamin Dobson that the attack occurred when she was discharging a patient at the beginning of her shift. As she checked the patient’s vitals, she began to feel very uncomfortable, telling the officers that she “could not describe any specific reason, other than her sixth sense told her something was not right with him.”
Here was her first clue: the patient was “sitting on the floor of the unit, with his pillowcase over his head,” according to the report.
Suddenly, “a quick movement by an unknown orange object (later identified as scissors placed into SPD Evidence section) is what caught her eye.” The report notes that the patient was “motioning with the scissors that he was attempting to cut his wrists,” and like any good psychiatric nurse, she and another hospital worker “ran into the room with [the patient] and attempted to gain control of the scissors and [the patient].”
As she wrestled the scissors away, “he reached up and grabbed [her] by the throat, applying ‘a lot’ of pressure and causing pain, ‘strangling’ her,” states the police report. The nurse and the other hospital worker estimated that the attempted asphyxiation last five seconds.
Police don’t appear to have questioned the suspect—he isn’t quoted in the report. However, officers note that the victim was, “visibly upset, crying, and emotional,” as she described the incident.
When asked if she could recall what her thoughts were during the attack, the victim “took a moment to respond, her eyes watering with fresh tears, and replied ‘Fuck.'” She said she was panicked. She “described the look on the [suspect’s] face while he was strangling her as that of anger, animalistic rage, and out of control. [She] stated she felt [he] was a threat to her life as he was strangling her.”
The suspect was discharged from the psych ward and taken into custody.
Fuck is right.
Maybe they were overly excited by the free ice cream cones they knew would be given out on Tuesday, May 10th?
I worked as an interpreter at Eastern State Hospital off and on for a couple of years. The staff made some incredibly boneheaded decisions that put me in great danger a couple of times. When it occurred to me one day that, as an outside contractor, I wasn’t covered by L&I I decided to bail for good. It was only a matter of time.
1. Boneheaded moves on the parts of the nurses (if a patient is escalated but not causing harm to his/herself it is best to call for backup before engaging)
2. Packed hospitals due to budget cuts
3. Quicker turn around within the hospitals and lack of thorough patient care due to budget cuts causes patients to return more frequently with more issues.
I worked as an interpreter in a forensic unit at Western State Hospital and the staff went out of their way to keep me protected and aware of any potential dangers.
A lot of bone-headed things happened but not on the parts of nurses.
@4: Yeah, I had good luck at the FSU at Eastern as well. I felt pretty safe there. It was the geriatric ward where I encountered danger.
Yeah, and? So? Those nurses should try being a patient at Western State. The wards are mixed and there’s virtually no security. When a patient gets dangerous, they get restrained and sedated for the period of the shift, and then released back into the general population of the ward. A man assaulted a girl in front of me, punching her repeatedly in the face. On the street, that gets you arrested and charged. He was at the end of his commitment term, and they discharged him the next day.
Seriously. Why is this surprising? Crazy people are crazy. This state has a miserable record with mental healthcare. The onus is on the staff. I’m sorry they get assaulted on a regular basis. I have respect for the Western State nurses. But speaking as a person who has experienced it, it is the system and practices, not the patients, that need to be examined.
You’ll never get to do that story. They’ll never let you in. They have to “protect privacy” and all. Never mind protecting the inmates.
While I’m sympathetic to the nurses, @3 is right, in both cases the nurses made poor decisions. I used to be a psych tech (the staff that has the most contact with patients in good times and bad) and we were trained well. Despite taking part in numerous escalations, I was never hurt and most of the time able to talk the patient down rather than resort to physical restraint.
I still use the verbal de-escalation techniques I learned there with the (relatively) non-mentally ill to great success.
Few things suck more then staffing a poorly run facility.
It can become really difficult to evaluate your own risk while seeking to protect your patient, particularly is your facility does not provide good training and protocol so support the staff in such situations.
The moment when your patient becomes a threat to your safety is terrifying, and it leaves a good caretaker feeling guilty, afraid, and just bad.
Harborview takes in what other hospitals shove in taxis. Patients in need show up confused not understanding what to do. Other hospitals aren’t supposed to do this but they do, all the time. Harborview never turns them away though.
The application/orientation process for HMC ER jobs clearly disclose the unpredictable, hi risk environment. You know it going in. The staff and management intentionally decline to militarize the ER. Yes, it might misplace trust once in a while, and staff do get roughed up. But we choose to stand by the hospital model, not the prison camp model some ER’s have adopted. Some jackass ER doctors actually carry pistols at work(none in Washington). Fundamental security procedures are in place, the guy in restraints with a lighter was a rare slip up. Staff putting themselves within fist range of hi risk folk usually are up to the task. It’s messy work, and we choose to do it. There’s plenty of Band-Aids available.