I was a hospital administrator for the last 12 years before I retired. I was on the facilities management side not the medical side but one of the departments under me was Security. The daily reports I read of the abuse our officers had to get in the middle of between staff and patients or their families were hard to read. Some is from the understandable stress when a family member is seriously and unexpectedly sick or injured and the family wants to see them taken care of immediately. That is normal but especially during the winter flu and pneumonia season the ER was often overwhelmed and it was not unusual that all our regular hospital beds were full as well as the other major hospitals in the region. Patients were triaged upon arrival but waits for those not having heart attacks, strokes or bleeding out could be very long. And all this was before Covid. It was a daily occurrence that medical staff was punched or shoved and local law enforcement had to be called. I had one officer that had a chunk taken out of her forearm by a patient bite. She rode out the medical leave and quit when she was cleared back for duty. As patients were checked in and their personal belongings gathered, having a gun found was not unusual. I'd like to say this was in some rough inner city hospital but it was in a very affluent suburb of Seattle that has major business operations such Microsoft, Google, Costco, Boeing and many others as anchors in the community. Imagine what the medical staff in the rougher and tougher locales have to deal with each shift.
= new reply since forum marked as read