A hospital should be the place for health and healing. For some nurses, however, it is now often the opposite: They experience violence in the workplace – up to and including attempted murder.
Munich – “Then he went straight into the room, slammed the door and started straight away. He just stabbed, ”said the 64-year-old nurse on Monday in front of the Munich II district court.“ Then I started screaming, really loud, ”she reminds her.
“I still remember that I asked: Why are you doing this?” At that moment, miraculously, she didn’t feel fear at all – rather astonishment: “So that’s how you die,” she thought. “You will be stabbed to death, I did not expect that.”
It was November 25th last year, in the middle of the night, when the patient stood in the door of the nurses’ room in a psychiatric facility in Peiting, Upper Bavaria, asking for medication. When she turned to the medicine cabinet, he stabbed her with nail scissors that he had hidden in his fist. The public prosecutor accused him of attempted murder, and so the German said it himself at the start of the trial.
According to the public prosecutor, there were 18 stitches, mainly in the neck and face of the nurse. They narrowly missed the carotid artery. It was only when a colleague came along that the man is said to have let go of her. The victim was hospitalized in critical condition. You thought the weapon was a knife. “I thought everything was torn up now.”
The accused wanted to go to jail
The accused denies a killing intention in court. He only wanted to seriously injure the woman so that he could then go to prison and leave the psychiatric facility in which he was located. “I wanted this to bleed properly,” he said to a psychiatric assessor.
He was afraid of the head of the facility, said the 32-year-old, who the court and prosecutor consider to be paranoid and schizophrenic. Because the head had the ability to partially exchange the psyches of patients with each other. He was afraid that he would “go out of this home with mental disabilities”.
As shocking as the event – it is far from an isolated incident. According to studies, many nurses experience violence in hospitals and care facilities.
In a study published in 2018 by the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) on behalf of the Professional Association for Health Services and Welfare (BGW), 70 percent of the 2,000 nurses surveyed stated that they had experienced physical violence at work in the past twelve months. In the case of verbal violence, it was 94 percent. According to a BGW spokeswoman, the highest values were found in the hospital area: 97 percent of the survey participants mentioned verbal and 76 percent physical violence.
Possibly a high number of unreported cases
The German Hospital Institute (DKI) listed an average of 5.7 accident reports per hospital in 2018 that were due to physical assaults. The number of assaults without consequences of accidents was significantly higher. A spokesman for the German Hospital Association (DKG) points out that there may be a high number of unreported cases. “One reason for this can be that employees do not register verbal assaults as violence, for example, or do not report minor physical assaults.”
The fact that clinics are now using security services is not an isolated case. The DKG does not have any figures on how many hospitals in Germany this has been the case so far. “In many clinics, however, they are mainly used in emergency rooms.”
The Nuremberg Clinic is a pioneer when it comes to safety. There is now also a contact point for employees who have been attacked while on duty. Andreas Röttenbacher, head of the security department, reports on incidents that did not take place in psychiatric wards or in the emergency room – which have long been known for acts of violence against doctors and nurses – but “on completely normal wards”, as he says.
Corona exacerbated the situation
In March of this year, for example, a patient tried to smoke out nurses from the nurses’ room – and set a fire on the hospital ward with rubbing alcohol. In July, a patient attacked the security service and threw a large stone slab at the employee in front of the clinic, who was just able to fend it off with his arm.
According to Kathrin Weidenfelder, trade union secretary at Verdi Bavaria for the specialist area of health, social services, welfare and churches, the corona pandemic has even made the situation worse – for example, because unrepentant relatives were violent when they were not allowed to enter the hospital. She says: “With Corona it got even worse.”
When the attacked nurse paused during her testimony before the Regional Court Munich II, her former patient took the floor: “I’m sorry that I did that,” he says. And she: “Thank you, I believe you.” Dpa
