At some stage before a nurse retires he or she will almost certainly be subjected to an assault at work, a conference on stress and violence in the nursing profession was told at the weekend. On a show of hands, almost two-thirds of the nurses present indicated that they had been assaulted.
The first national conference on nursing health, organised by Health Counsel, an independent training provider for the health sector, heard that, although aggression and violence against health services staff had become a serious problem in recent years, it was under-reported.
Speaking on the prevention of assaults against nurses, Mr James Walsh, director of nurse education with the Eastern Health Board, said that an attitude of "it'll never happen to me" was no longer acceptable.
Mr Walsh told the conference that a nurse was now more likely to be assaulted in a busy accident and emergency room than in a psychiatric hospital. It was "frightening", he said, that many studies had found that hospital staff were repeatedly being assaulted by the same person.
On this issue Ms Margaret Ryder, nurse service provider at Cork University Hospital, told the conference that the Southern Health Board was currently consulting legal advisers on the appropriateness of keeping a list of what she called "habitual offenders". She said that she herself had been a victim of violence when a broken bottle had been held to her throat at work.
The assistant general secretary of the Irish Nurses' Organisation, Ms Lenore Mrkwicka, said that a survey she conducted found that almost half of the respondents had experienced sexual harassment. Of these, 31 per cent had experienced harassment more than once. Of 60 female nurses surveyed, although 48 per cent had suffered sexual harassment, only 15 per cent had reacted against it.
She said that the INO was currently carrying out a survey of bullying. "We've had over 1,000 replies to the survey, with 100 respondents saying they were glad the issue had been raised", she added.