Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Windsor Regional Hospital nurse recovering after 'horrible' workplace choking

http://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/windsor-regional-hospital-nurse-recovering-after-horrible-workplace-choking

Windsor Regional Hospital Ouellette Campus Nick Brancaccio / Windsor Star
A month after a patient choked her in a brutal attack a registered practical nurse is looking forward to returning to work at Windsor Regional Hospital.

Hospital CEO David Musyj described the choking as the worst level of violence at the hospital since he’s been there — close to 20 years — and is reflective of an alarming rise in violence in hospitals and other health-care institutions, here and across the country.

He said in the last year there have been 20 staff physically harmed at Windsor Regional — from scratches and bruises to more serious injuries. There were another 200 incidents in which staff have been threatened. Some of those threats may well have progressed to violence except for anti-violence measures put in place, he said. He described the response by staff to the choking incident as “amazing, really amazing.”

“It was a horrible thing to happen to our member,” Chris Sutton, a national health and safety representative for the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said of the attack. He praised the hospital for its handling of the incident and its quick followup to ensure nothing similar happens again.

“We are grateful the outcome for our member was not worse than what occurred and that she is recovering and looking forward to going back to work.”

Two co-workers ran to her aid within a few seconds and hospital security was on the scene in under a minute, according to Sutton, who said the system the hospital has in place to ensure staff safety worked.

The registered practical nurse activated her personal alarm system, which all staff at the hospital’s Ouellette campus began wearing following the 2005 murder of Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital nurse Lori Dupont by co-worker Dr. Marc Daniel, who subsequently killed himself. The program was continued after the building changed hands in 2013, from Hotel-Dieu Grace to Windsor Regional.
When the alarm sounds, or when “code white” is called, it’s an all-hands-on-deck scenario, with staff running to assist.

Union and hospital officials were reluctant to provide details of the attack, citing patient and employee confidentiality and concerns about jeopardizing a case that might end up in court. But Sutton said police and the Ministry of Labour were notified and that police are investigating. He also said the hospital held a forum Friday to discuss the incident and its aftermath, and tweak its policies and procedures.
“There is a good outcome,” Sutton said. “And the (RPN) has said what happened to her was bad, but she came in and participated in the forum because she wanted to make sure everything reasonable that could be done would be done to ensure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

Health-care unions including CUPE have been campaigning against a rising level of violence in health-care institutions, whether it be against staff or patient-on-patient.

Donna MacInnes, the Ontario Nurses Association bargaining unit president for Windsor Regional, said the incident is an example of the violence nurses contend with. “It does happen on a daily basis. Whether they’re spit on or name calling or hitting, it happens every day,” she said.
“But this one here, in my opinion, was dealt with properly.”

ONA has launched a campaign to end workplace violence “because of the rising and daily occurrence of violence in our health care institutions,” said ONA first vice-president Vicki McKenna, whose union cites a 6.4 per cent increase in lost-time injuries due to workplace violence in health care in 2014 compared to 2013. There were 680 violence-caused injuries in the health-care sector in Ontario in 2014, compared to just 80 violence injuries in manufacturing, 11 in construction and zero in mining.

And research shows that there are many more of these attacks that people aren’t reporting, said McKenna, whose union has been working with the province’s labour and health ministries on an action plan.

“The reports we are hearing from the field are daily,” she said.

Musyj cited two factors in the rising number and severity of violent acts: patients coping with mental health and the drug epidemic. Patients on drugs or in withdrawal can have violent and unexpected outbursts. Even while in the hospital, addicts are continually seeking and acquiring drugs. People sometimes bring street drugs in for patients.

ONA’s McKenna said in many cases, the increase in violence is caused by understaffing, and failing to appreciate that your staff numbers shouldn’t always be based on simple patient-to-staff ratios. “You have to staff based on what patients need, not the mathematical equation,” she said.
She said the violence often happens when patients are in altered states, from illegal drugs or medications, or from dementia or head injuries.

“This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t receive care,” she said. “It just means you have to have the adequate staff and support so you can care for people properly.”

Monday, March 13, 2017

Health-care workers face ‘epidemic of violence’

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/03/13/health-care-workers-face-epidemic-of-violence.html

The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions is urging the ministry of labour to do more to protect health-care workers who face daily threats of violence on the job.
Mourners exit St. John The Baptist church  passing an honour guard of nurses in Amherstburg, Ont., in  2005, where funeral services were held for slain nurse Lori Dupont, who was stabbed to death at a Windsor hospital by a doctor she had ended a relationship with. In the wake of Dupont's death the province introduced legislation requiring employers to have programs in place to deal with workplace violence and harassment.
Mourners exit St. John The Baptist church passing an honour guard of nurses in Amherstburg, Ont., in 2005, where funeral services were held for slain nurse Lori Dupont, who was stabbed to death at a Windsor hospital by a doctor she had ended a relationship with. In the wake of Dupont's death the province introduced legislation requiring employers to have programs in place to deal with workplace violence and harassment.  (Dan Janisse / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO)  
Ontario’s nurses and personal support workers are facing an “epidemic of violence” caused by government and hospitals’ failure to safeguard them from abuse, assault and sexual harassment, according to the body representing health-care providers.
In a letter sent Monday to Minister of Labour Kevin Flynn, Ontario Council of Hospital Unions president Michael Hurley expressed dismay at the “daily” threats health-care workers confront on the job, which he calls “unacknowledged, dismissed, or tolerated by administrators and regulators.”
“In no other occupation or walk of life would such abuse be tolerated,” Hurley said.
Health-care workers have the second highest number of reported injuries in the province — behind the service sector, but ahead of such industries as construction, mining and manufacturing, according to the latest available statistics from the workers’ compensation board. In 2014, a study by the Canadian Institute for Health Information found at least half of all registered practical nurses were assaulted by patients, the letter obtained by the Star says.
Ontario Council of Hospital Unions president Michael Hurley has written a letter to Minister of Labour Kevin Flynn expressing alarm over the "daily" threats health-care workers face on the job.
Ontario Council of Hospital Unions president Michael Hurley has written a letter to Minister of Labour Kevin Flynn expressing alarm over the "daily" threats health-care workers face on the job.  (Michael Stuparyk/Toronto Star File Photo)  
New research commissioned by OCHU, which will be published this year, also has documented “widespread and systemically accepted violence” among health-care staff in seven Ontario communities, according to the letter.
All but one of the 54 workers interviewed in that study said they directly experienced violence at work, according to Jim Brophy, who conducted the research with fellow occupational health expert Margaret Keith.
“It’s become so normalized, so accepted, that now it’s really viewed as part of the job. You might as well put it in as part of the job description,” Brophy told the Star.
“I was scandalized by how much it was replicating all the features of domestic violence. Blaming the victims, keeping the dirty little secret quiet, really internalizing all of this.”
Dianne Paulin, a registered practical nurse from North Bay with 25 years of job experience, says she would have been spared her life-changing injures if the psychiatric ward she worked on had implemented common sense policies like bolting down furniture.
Instead, she was assaulted by a patient who pinned her against his room door with a chair and repeatedly punched her, leaving her with a bulging neck disc, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks.
Dianne Paulin, a registered practical nurse from North Bay, was brutally assaulted by a patient in the psychiatric ward where she worked in an attack that left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks.
Dianne Paulin, a registered practical nurse from North Bay, was brutally assaulted by a patient in the psychiatric ward where she worked in an attack that left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks.   (Supplied Photo)  
“You don’t go to work and think you’re going to die. I went to work because I loved my job and the clients liked me,” she said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing. It was the environment.”
Workers identified underfunding and understaffing as “significant contributors” to workplace violence, often perpetrated by patients or their family members against employees who are sometimes forced to work alone because of shortages. Brophy said the abuse often took on a sexual and racial hue because many health-care workers are women of colour. But fear of reprisal from hospital managers discouraged nurses and other staff from raising the issue, he said.
“Nobody is allowed to talk about it. Health-care workers are frightened. We had to conduct these interviews pretty close to secretly.”
In 2010, the Ontario government introduced legislation requiring employers to have programs in place to deal with workplace violence and harassment. Those reforms were prompted by the 2005 slaying of Windsor nurse Lori Dupont, who was stabbed multiple times in the chest at work by a physician she had ended a relationship with.
In a statement to the Star, the minister of labour’s spokesperson, Michael Speers, said the government is “committed to addressing workplace violence in the health-care sector and is developing a plan to make hospitals safer. A progress report on that initiative is expected to be released in the coming weeks.
“No one should feel unsafe at work, and concrete steps are needed to ensure the safety of our health-sector workers,” Speers said.
Last year, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health was slapped with an $80,000 fine under workplace safety laws in relation to a 2014 beating of a nurse by a patient who reportedly left the victim “beyond recognition.”
Brophy said his research found workers often had little awareness about what policies were in place to protect them at their hospitals.
“The problem is widespread, it’s pervasive, it’s unreported. But when you go to the workplace, you find it’s not being taken seriously by the employers.”
The letter makes several recommendations to government, including that the ministry of labour launches a program of “comprehensive inspections and audits of all of Ontario’s health-care facilities” to ensure effective protections are in place, and that every workplace has safeguards like personal monitors, alarms, and identification of violent patients. It also calls for co-operation with the ministry of health to ensure adequate staffing levels, and the presence of trained security personnel where needed.
Government should “immediately enact” whistleblower protection for workers who speak out about workplace violence, the letter adds.
Nurses at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health protest against workplace violence in December 2014, shortly after charges were laid by the labour ministry over the brutal beating of a nurse. Back row, left to right: Holly Williams, Andy Summers and David Tennant. Front row, left to right: Danielle Latulippe-Larmand, Terry Mendoza and Oswin Chang. CAMH was later fined $80,000 in the beating incident.
Nurses at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health protest against workplace violence in December 2014, shortly after charges were laid by the labour ministry over the brutal beating of a nurse. Back row, left to right: Holly Williams, Andy Summers and David Tennant. Front row, left to right: Danielle Latulippe-Larmand, Terry Mendoza and Oswin Chang. CAMH was later fined $80,000 in the beating incident.   (Gregory Bennett/COURTESY OF THE ONTARIO NURSES ASSOCIATION)  
Paulin, 60, has been unable to work since she was attacked in 2011. Although she received workers’ compensation for her injuries, she says her benefits were cut in half in 2015 after the board told her — against the advice of her psychiatrist, she says — that she was able to return to work. She is now appealing the decision.
The WSIB cannot comment on individual cases, but a board spokesperson, Christine Arnott, said the board’s aim is to “help injured workers recover safely and return to work and their lives.”
“Ultimately, we want people to recover successfully and receive the assistance they need from the WSIB. If someone is concerned about a decision or other aspects of their claim, we encourage them to speak with us. We are here to help,” she said.
“Right now I’m going to the banks because I owe too much money, because I’ve been struggling and struggling since they knocked me in half,” said Paulin. “I’m at the point where I have to sell the house.”
She says she has already lost something even more valuable.
“I’m not me.” she said. “I’ve never been me since this happened.

HOOPP's 2016 Results: 122% funded, $70 billion in assets


Friday, March 10, 2017

Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare cutting nursing jobs, but expects no layoffs

http://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/hotel-dieu-grace-healthcare-cutting-nursing-jobs-but-expects-no-layoffs?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter

Brian Cross, Windsor Star

The exterior of Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare is pictured in this July 2015 file photo. Dax Melmer / Windsor Star
In what it is calling a “course correction,” Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare is reducing the ratio of registered nurses to patients on some of its units from one-to-three to one-to-five or one-to-six.
Hospital and union leadership say the quality of care to its patients in its complex continuing care units should not suffer.

And while the change will cause upheaval, the nursing job losses will be small and done through attrition, they say.

“It will look different, but it will not be poor quality care,” CEO Janice Kaffer said Friday. Staff got news of the changes on Thursday.

Acknowledging that some of her members are upset, Jo-dee Brown, president of the hospital’s Ontario Nurses’ Association unit, said the complex continuing care units in Hotel-Dieu Grace’s Emara Centre For Healthy Aging and Mobility are “generously staffed” — a situation inherited from when Windsor Regional Hospital ran the campus.

“Maybe if you’ve been coming to work for 20 years and been that extra pair of hands, and now all of a sudden you’re not going to be that extra pair of hands, maybe that isn’t palatable. I get that,” said Brown, who has about 171 active members.

“I guess it’s time for reflection for the individual. Do they want to pull up their socks and earn their money in a different way, or do they want to leave?”

Kaffer, who is a nurse, said that current one-to-three ratio is better coverage than at many acute care hospitals.

A realignment in 2013 saw the city’s two hospitals trade locations and change their roles. Windsor Regional became the acute care hospital at two campuses. Hotel-Dieu Grace became the non-acute hospital at the Tayfour campus on Prince Road, typically taking care of patients for weeks and months as they recover from major illnesses or go through end-of-life stages in palliative care.
When there are few patients on a unit, the nurse-to-patient ratio can be as low as one-to-one or one-to-two, Kaffer said.

There are also registered nurses who aren’t assigned patients. Instead, these more highly skilled RNs spend their shifts assisting registered practical nurses with tasks RPNs could be doing. As part of this staffing change, RPNs are getting extra training so they can work “their full scope of practice,” Kaffer said.

She said there will be reductions in the numbers of both RPNs and RNs. The numbers haven’t been revealed yet to staff but she said it will be much less than a 10 per cent cut, and should be handled by early retirement packages.

“It does change the workload, appropriately so,” said Kaffer, adding that the change will be made gradually over the next six to 12 months, to ensure there’s no decline in quality of care. “It’s what I’m calling a course correction.”

Brown said the union will learn more details about the staff changes at a meeting with management on Wednesday. But she’s been assured no one will be going out the door involuntarily.

“I’m not happy with it either, but fiscal responsibility and reality is something we have to live with and I believe that the employer has handled this in the most fiscally responsible way they can right now,” she said.

bcross@postmedia.com