Aggression in healthcare
89 percent of healthcare providers think that aggression in healthcare has increased over the past five years. David Baden does not dare to say with certainty whether this is really the case. Baden is an emergency physician and chairman of the Dutch Association of Emergency Physicians (NVSHA). “Colleagues who have been in the profession for forty years say that this level of violence was exceptional at the time. I’ve only been in the business for ten years. This already happened ten years ago,” he says.
Baden does think that impatience in society increases. “People often ask after an hour why it takes so long. An hour is nothing in the emergency room; We aim to treat people within three hours, and that is not always possible due to crowds.” Also the subject is more in the news because people are more aware that this should not be part of their job. “We learn to set boundaries, and that is also positive in a way.”
Duty of care
The emergency room is a place where aggression is common, Baden knows. “People often come to us with a lot of pain, so they want to be helped as quickly as possible. If that is not possible, they sometimes become unreasonable. Moreover, we have a duty of care. At the NS, in the catering industry and at call centers they also have to deal with aggressive customers, but they can hang up the phone or kick people out. We can’t just do that.”
“We can give people a so-called ‘red card’, which means they are in principle no longer welcome in the hospital, but acute care is an exception to this,” Baden explains. “We have had cases where someone had hit a nurse, but returned the same evening for acute care and was still just as unreasonable.”
Tags: Emergency room doctor aggression healthcare
