HOSPITALS are somewhere that broken bodies go to heal.
They should not be places where the staff whose job it is to look after the lives and well-being of others are subjected to any sort of affront - let alone the outright violence of assault.
Yet as nurses, doctors, orderlies and security guards in our major public hospitals all know, going to work can have more than its share of risks, especially at nights and on weekends when accident and emergency wards can fill with patients who arrive in less than coherent states.
Once upon a time, the worst offenders would be angry injured drinkers who might begin in a blaze of abuse but soon be snoring the sleep of the deeply drunk.
People overdosed on heroin or other opiates might be a danger to themselves, but less so to others.
In recent years, however, accident and emergency staff, especially, have had to endure an "Ice Age" in dealing with patients full of this long-lasting methyl amphetamine.
We've had patients that look seven kilos wringing wet, and we have had police officers, male nurses and security guards struggling to hold them down.
Security guard and union representative Boyd Hanson
Mental health and psychiatric staff have long known not to turn their backs on patients.
Ice users, although otherwise unremarkable, are often the sort of patient who hospital security guard and union representative Boyd Hanson is referring to when he talks of someone "seven kilos wringing wet" needing a team of men to subdue.
Statistics for the Hunter Region's four major hospitals - Belmont, John Hunter, Maitland and the Mater - show that assaults on staff are, at best, maintaining a similar level from year to year, and in some cases have increased noticeably.
The figures were obtained under freedom-of-information laws from the Hunter New England Local Health District as part of the Newcastle Herald's Your Right To Know campaign.
They can be read as a sign of a need for a greater security presence in the health system.
They are also an indictment of public behaviour, or at least the behaviour of a cohort who seem unable to restrain themselves in circumstances where the staff they assault are only trying to help them, and in some cases save their lives.
That said, the Hunter is hardly the only region where hospital staff are subject to appalling and often dangerous behaviour.
Queensland Health, for example, reported 6300 attacks on health workers statewide in 2019.
But there is no excuse for any sort of aggression in our hospitals - or towards our ambulance staff, who often cop a similarly torrid time.
Enough is enough.
ISSUE: 39,638.
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