NURSING

Violent Crime Against Nurses is Growing:

About 25 percent of nurses experienced workplace violence in the last year, and pressure is growing for regulators to take steps to protect them, Alexia Fernández Campbell reports for The Atlantic.

The health care sector makes up just 9 percent of the overall U.S. workforce—but it experiences nearly as many violent injuries as all other industries combined, Campbell writes. Between 2005 and 2014, the rate of health care workplace violence increased by 110 percent in private-sector hospitals, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

Nurses bear much of that abuse: According to a 2015 study published in the Journal of Emergency Nursing, 76 percent of nurses at a private hospital system in Virginia said they had experienced physical or verbal abuse from patients in the previous year.

What’s behind the trend

Violence in health care settings is in some ways unavoidable, Nurses and doctors must deal with patients who are in emotionally volatile situations; cognitive deficits also may lead some patients to lash out. When you are walking to your vehicle at night, a perpetrator can lurk in the shadows and wait until you are alone. That’s when they attack.

We developed PanicAPP to help fight the violent crimes against nurses. With PanicAPP, you only have to click the panic button and your GPS location, along with streaming video and audio is instantly displayed to the hospital security dispatcher and the local police. Now help can be deployed instantly without going through any third parties.