COVID-19 pandemic fuels attacks on health workers globally

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Two Nigerian nurses were attacked by the family of a deceased COVID-19 patient. One nurse had her hair ripped out and suffered a fracture. The second was beaten into a coma.

Following the assaults, nurses at Federal Medical Centre in the Southwestern city of Owo stopped treating patients, demanding the hospital improve security. Almost two weeks passed before they returned to work with armed guards posted around the clock.

“We don’t give life. It is God that gives life. We only care or we manage,” said Francis Ajibola, a local leader with the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives.

The attack in Nigeria early last month was just one of many on health workers globally during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new report by the Geneva-based Insecurity Insight and the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center identified more than 1,100 threats or acts of violence against health care workers and facilities last year.

https://apnews.com/article/covid-19-fuels-attacks-health-workers-92b2df8f56118ffce9d3507a62ae941e

[dutch777]

1. This is interesting as an international perspective...but violence against nurses is endemic in US

I was on the executive team of a US hospital for a number of years prior to retiring a few years ago. My last two years I had the Safety/Security team in my leadership portfolio. The hospital was in an affluent suburb of Seattle so I am not talking inner city tough neighborhood here. I was astonished to find out that we had at least one violent attack on front line staff, almost always nurses, every shift 24/7/365 on average. Many ended up with the nurse in our own emergency department to get treated or at least checked out. We even had one of our security officers that had a bite of flesh bitten off her arm trying to get one of these patients under control.

There were a lot of causes but the bottom line always seemed to be the patient or a family member expected the nurses to perform miracles or make them better real fast. Frequently, the patient's reason for being in the hospital was a matter of their own bad choices, but now they wanted a near instant fix to some condition they brought on themselves or made worse by chronically poor decisions. Drug and alchohol abuse were frequently in the mix and a lot of sense of entitlement.

So this is the "normal" from which that same medical staff had to go into the Covid world with. The fact that these folks have remained in the fight for so long with such little protest is astonishing to me, given how little support they have from many, certainly little from Repub political leadership, lack of PPE and the risk of getting the disease themselves although hopefully now many are vaccinated. It's a sad world we live in when we attack or fail to adequately support the people most dedicated to helping us at our most needy and worrisome time.