CHICAGO _ One woman describes getting slapped and groped on the job. Another was punched in the head repeatedly. A third was bitten so hard that a spike in blood pressure burst an aneurysm in her brain, altering her life forever.
All three are nurses, who say their jobs place them in harm's way as the rate of violent incidents at hospitals appears to be growing.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the rate of hospital employees intentionally injured on the job at the hands of another person is significantly higher than the rate across all private industries. In 2015, the most recent year available, there were 8.5 cases of injuries per 10,000 full-time hospital workers, versus 1.7 cases for all private industries.
The data also shows that injury number for hospital workers steadily rose from 2011 to 2014 but dropped slightly the following year.
According to an Occupational Safety and Health Administration guide on addressing violence in hospitals, 70 to 74 percent of workplace assaults between 2011 and 2013 happened in health care settings.
And hospitals in the Chicago area have not been immune to such violence in recent years.
In May, two nurses at Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital in Geneva were taken hostage by a Kane County jail inmate after he got hold of the gun of a corrections officer guarding him. One of the nurses was sexually assaulted, according to a lawsuit filed in the case, before the inmate was fatally shot by police, authorities said.
Less than a month later at Presence St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, a convicted murderer who was there for treatment used a makeshift weapon to hold a corrections officer and a nursing assistant hostage.
In 2014, a man who had been taken to NorthShore Highland Park Hospital after a car crash was shot and killed by police after removing a gun from his waistband, according to police accounts.
Experts say facilities across the country have been affected. In June, a disgruntled doctor opened fire at a New York City hospital, killing another doctor and injuring several other people before taking his own life. In 2015, at a Boston hospital, a man shot and killed the surgeon who'd operated on his mother before she died.
While such extreme examples are rarer, many health care workers _ especially nurses _ say they deal with more minor incidents of physical aggression or verbal abuse on an almost daily basis. Many have stories of intoxicated or delusional patients who spit, claw and hit, or angry family members who threaten lawsuits or even lives.
For too long, nursing advocates say, aggression toward hospital workers has been chalked up to just an unfortunate part of the job, and patients are rarely held accountable.
Yet a movement to change this culture seems to be gaining momentum, with nurses' groups speaking out at protests and on social media, and lobbying for legislation that aims to curtail violence against health care workers.
Nurses point out that they're the ones with the most contact with patients and their families, often during times of crisis and intense stress. Heartbreak over a serious diagnosis, anger over a long emergency room wait or even a general disdain for the health care and insurance fields _ all can translate into hostility toward nurses, experts say.
"Just going into work is a high-risk endeavor," said Lisa Wolf, director at the Institute for Emergency Nursing Research at the Emergency Nurses Association and a registered nurse who has studied emergency room violence. "You're going to work and people are in some ways feeling like they can kill you."
Nurses' groups generally would like to see more staffing and more training. Other observers say there's no single solution that would work for all hospitals _ an industry struggling to do more with fewer resources.
While many states, including Illinois, have enhanced penalties for offenders who attack nurses, there's also a push for federal legislation or an OSHA standard that would regulate hospital staffing levels and install other violence prevention measures.
Some who've studied the problem say it's even worse than the statistics suggest. Verbal abuse is not included in government reporting, and while many hospitals have a system for employees to report acts of violence, nurses say they often don't have or take the time to take advantage of them.
