A hospital should be a place of healing. For some nurses, however, it becomes the opposite: They experience violence in the workplace – from verbal derailments to attempted murder.
Munich – According to studies, many nurses experience violence in hospitals. A particularly serious case is being heard at the Regional Court in Munich II.
A mentally ill man is on trial there for allegedly trying to murder a nurse in the nurses’ room in a clinic in Peiting, Upper Bavaria. According to the prosecutor, he is said to have stabbed the woman with nail scissors.
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.
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 the emergency rooms,” said the spokesman.
According to Kathrin Weidenfelder, trade union secretary at Verdi Bavaria for the health, social services, welfare and churches department, the corona pandemic has even made the situation worse – for example, because unrepentant relatives became physical if they were not admitted to the hospital. dpa
