COLUMBIA, S.C. — A recent report by the South Carolina Hospital Association (SCHA) says violent behavior towards healthcare workers is on the rise across the country and the state of South Carolina is no exception.
“Before a lot of the awareness around workplace violence had raised, a lot of our care team members generally considered it part of the job,” Dr. Danielle Scheurer said.
Dr. Scheurer is the chief body officer at MUSC Health, she says the conversation about violence against health care workers is one that often goes unnoticed.
“Our reportable workplace violence events have gone up pretty consistently really since we started measuring them. We believe that we’re getting more reports, we’re not necessarily seeing more violent events but that people’s threshold for tolerating it has gone down,” she said.
According to the SCHA, healthcare workers are five times as likely to sustain workplace violence injuries than any other profession.
“While we did see the emergency department was the most frequent place where incidents occurred, we also are seeing trends up on patient floors, which is kind of surprising. You would normally think that the emergency department is kind of a chaotic environment anyway, it's pretty easy for something scary to happen down there, but we're also seeing it for a variety of reasons that it's happening on patient floors as well,” Lara Hewitt said.
Hewitt is the vice president of workforce and member engagement with the SCHA.
“We’re doing a lot of work with hospitals trying to figure out what things work, whether it's some kind of new technology or new training for certain staff or for other pieces of equipment, like weapon detection systems. We're trying to figure out what things are they using that are pretty effective and we're sharing that learning across the state as well,” she said.
According to the data in the study, nurses accounted for 47.7% of workplace violence in 2023, with incidents most commonly occurring in patient rooms/bathrooms.
“We do a lot of drills now to make sure that our response teams are responding in a timely fashion so we measure the turnaround time we debrief on all those drills to make sure that everyone knows what their role is and that our response times are very fast,” Dr. Scheurer said.
De-escalation trainings, duress buttons in clinical areas and flagging violent patients are some of the many things the medical university hospital is doing to keep their staff safe.
"It is very real. It’s not unique to MUSC or South Carolina. I'm just grateful that it's part of of the conversation now. It didn't used to be really even discussed within health care much less outside of health care. it really takes a village to control what we can control and keep our team members safe,” Dr. Scheurer said.