Legislation in Maine Looks to Address Violence Against Nurses

The state of Maine is taking health care worker’s safety seriously in a newly proposed bill. State Sen. Jarrett Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat, is introducing a bill that will require a range of safety measures. Namely, health-care providers of five or more employees create employee training programs and a system for reporting and monitoring incidents of violence. Providers would also have to create a written violence-prevention plan that describes factors that would put employees at risk of violence and what methods the facility would take to prevent the violence, such as use of security, equipment, staffing and employee training.

The Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), a primary motivator of the legislation, cited figures from the state Bureau of Labor Statistics in which more than 4,000 hospital employees were assaulted last year while working in emergency setting across the state. Additional studies from hen researchers from the MNA and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst polled 172 nurses at three hospitals this year, more than 30 percent said they were physically threatened over the last two years and 25 percent said they'd been pinched, scratched, spit on or their hands or wrists were twisted on the job. Fifty percent reported being punched at least once; seven said people have tried to strangle them in the past two years; eight said they were sexually assaulted, and two were intentionally stuck with contaminated needles.