The Nova Scotia Nurses Union is happy with the progress being made toward reducing violence against healthcare workers, according to an article on the Herald News website.
“Two years ago when we started working on this there was not a lot of policies in place,” union president, Janet Hazelton, said in the article.
There were 872 formal reports of violence in Nova Scotia Health Authority (NSHA) facilities from January to December 2017. The nurses union said the number doesn’t reflect the true number of incidents because most still go unreported.
Hazelton said a recently released NSHA report emphasizes that staff are legally obligated to report all incidents.
“It used to be five, 10 years ago, that was just part of my job. I worked in emerg, you get hit, well that’s it. And if we tried to report it, that’s what we were told — it’s part of your job. That’s not the reaction that this employer has anymore and that’s fantastic.”