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OKLAHOMA CITY – Hospitals are experiencing a significant increase in violence against health care workers, prosecutors reported Thursday.
“We're reaching kind of a tipping point,” said Maggie Martin, chief legal officer for the Oklahoma Hospital Association.
Her remarks were made to attendees at a District Attorneys' Council meeting in Oklahoma City.
Martin said there had been a 63 percent increase in violence against health workers in recent years.
Martin said two nurses are assaulted every hour at the hospital.
Assault or battery on a health care worker remains a felony, she said.
Hospitals can certainly remove people who pose a threat, but they still must allow access to emergency rooms, she said.
“There's a lot of incidents happening there,” Martin said.
Bennett Geister, president of OKC Community Mercy, spoke of a recent incident in which a family member gave alcohol to a hospitalized patient, who then attacked staff and caused extensive damage to rooms and equipment. The patient had to be sedated, he said.
“The emergency room is where staff are most amenable to filing charges,” Geister said. “They're the ones most used to it. They see it the most.”
Smaller rural facilities don't have the resources to provide their own security or deal with violence, he said.
He said the hospital is compiling a detailed report on what happened to try to prevent it from happening again in the future.
“It certainly appears they have a ton of information, but that information never makes it into law enforcement reports,” Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said.
Kunzweiler said this information is crucial when prosecutors evaluate the strength of their case.
He questioned how prosecutors could have more access to that information since they aren't getting it through the normal channels.
“There's a big difference between lawyers representing hospitals and lawyers representing doctors,” he said.
Kunzweiler said he would prefer to speak with the doctor's lawyers, not the hospital's, to interview witnesses because the hospital is concerned about avoiding liability.
Tammy Powell is president of SSM Health St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City.
“We have employees who are paralyzed,” she said. “Now we have employees who have broken their spines.”
Greg Mashburn, district attorney for Cleveland, Garvin and McLean counties, said his staff has received strong pushback from Norman Hospital when they try to get information, making it difficult to prosecute the case.
