Página 54 - Teacher’s book - ENGLISH FOR HEALTH-CARE PROVIDERS

52 ENGLISH FOR HEALTH-CARE PROVIDERS
Unit 10. ER Safety
Narrator: Every week in the United States between eight and thirty percent of emergency
department nurses are victims of physical violence, according to a new study released by
the Emergency Nurses Association.
Elizabeth McCoy: It’s been kind scary. We have had nurses that were severely injured, from
violent acts towards them. It makes you feel frightened. It makes you scared to come into
your job sometimes because you just don’t know if you’re going to get hurt like, you know, it’s
not like a police officer. We wear a vest and you’re expecting something to happen. We don’t
do that, we just want to get care, we’re not thinking about always protecting ourselves.
Narrator: Elizabeth McCoy is a nurse at the emergency room at Morristown Memorial for
close to fourteen years.
Elizabeth McCoy: There have been broken necks, there have been stabbings, there have
been some very acute injuries were our staff members weren’t able to come back to
work.
Narrator: More than half the nurses surveyed by ENA reported experiencing physical or
verbal abuse at work in the last seven days. Emergency department violence survey study
also found that fifty percent of the nurses who reported experiencing physical violence said
they sustained a physical injury as a result of the incident in enormous half the cases no
action was taken against the perpetrator.
Dr. Mary Kamienski: People suddenly come into the emergency department I’m an emer-
gency nurse…
Narrator: Dr. Mary Kamienski is currently serving as a member of the ENA Board of Direc-
tors.
Dr. Mary Kamienski: Emergency nurse violence is… it is such an issue that is a part of our
strategic plan of the National Emergency Nurses Association to make the workplace safe
for emergency nurses and all the other personnel there.
And it isn’t just an issue for emergency nurses or health-care personnel that are working in
the department, because every patient in that department, if there is violence going on in
there, they are also a risk.
There’s a lot of strategies that we teach nurses and we teach health-care personnel things
such as if the person is drinking or under the influence, you don’t get cornered in the room
with them. Those are just safety precautions.
Narrator: Having an enclosed nurses’ station, security sites and well-laid areas are associ-
ated with significantly lower verbal abuse rates.
Elizabeth McCoy: On all our nursing and emergency department, you can only have ac-
cess if you work here and have appropriate privileges to be in the emergency department,
and this helps prevent on patients and people who should not be in here.