Attacks against healthcare workers on the rise in COVID-19 era

Editor's Note

A week and a half after Chicago’s COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, a nurse taking a bus home after her shift was attacked by another passenger because she coughed into the crook of her arm. The nurse was wearing a mask, and she was dressed in scrubs, and she told the man she was a nurse.

The man accused her of trying to infect him, made a fist, and punched her in the left eye as he exited the bus. The nurse told a local news station that she worried that the well-publicized lack of PPE had made people wary of healthcare workers.

Though violence against healthcare workers has been on the rise for about a decade, COVID-19 has escalated it, notes an April 21 JAMA Medical News & Perspectives.

In a National Nurses United survey of more than 15,000 US nurses, 20% said they faced increased on-the-job violence, which they attributed to COVID-19-related staffing shortages, changes in patient population, and restrictions for visitors.

A study by researchers from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in New York found that healthcare workers were nearly 50% more likely than others to have been harassed, bullied, or hurt as a result of COVID-19.

A guide published by the Red Cross to help reduce or prevent attacks against healthcare workers noted, “alarming incidents of healthcare workers being stigmatized, ostracized, harassed, or threatened for allegedly spreading the virus.”

To help healthcare facilities develop a violence prevention and mitigation program, the CDC has recommendations for limiting COVID-19 related violence, OSHA offers violence prevention guidelines for healthcare workers, and The Joint Commission has a Sentinel Event Alert 59 on physical and verbal violence against healthcare workers.