Protesters want workplace made safer

Unionised mental health workers say reluctance to use seclusion on dangerous patients puts them in danger. Photo / Greg Bowker

Mental health workers protesting for better protection at work have told of patients beating and badly scratching nurses and fellow patients.

More than 50 unionised workers from around the Auckland region gathered to protest at Auckland City Hospital at lunchtime yesterday.

They marched through the hospital grounds to its acute mental health unit, Te Whetu Tawera, where Public Service Association leaders demanded greater safety and more support for staff from the unit's managers.

The unit reported 213 assaults on staff and patients, from minor to serious, in the past year. Ninety-one were punching or striking, six throwing hot liquid, and four involved choking.

The union agrees with the letter of former Te Whetu Tawera nurse Lauren Meraw to Health Minister Tony Ryall, and others calling for changes. She says the 58-bed unit's nurses are "frequently plagued with verbal and physical abuse by patients, patients have threatened to kill me ...

"In a matter of three days I witnessed two staff members and one patient endure a brutal beating from one patient. As a result of being punched multiple times in the head and knocked to the ground, these individuals had to be assessed in the emergency department."

At the march, one staffer from the unit, who declined to be named, said the worst assaults he'd seen there were a patient being thrown against the nursing station window and a male nurse "beaten to the ground". The patient was badly bruised on his head and face and the nurse couldn't finish his shift.

"There's lots of spitting, scratching and biting. I've been scratched before and had to get my blood tested for any transmissible diseases."

A second staffer said: "I think we under-respond to the risk because we are so anxious about using restrictive interventions.

"I attribute that in part to the Government policy around seclusion. There's a big focus against the use of more-restrictive interventions."

The first staff member said more seclusion wasn't necessarily the answer, but management should listen to nurses when they advised seclusion.

Ms Meraw's letter says managers often refuse to put patients in a seclusion room. These locked one-patient rooms have low lighting, no furniture, and two-way glass so the patient can be observed for safety.

The Auckland District Health Board director of mental health nursing, Anna Schofield, said after receiving the union's resolutions: "We acknowledge assaults are occurring and we're taking this very seriously."

The unit's clinical director, Dr Greg Finucane, said it didn't intend to eliminate use of seclusion but it had been reduced to about 20 episodes a month.