Climate of violence against healthcare workers prompts Kansas bill to stiffen penalties
In May 2019 Sarah Evans Simpson, a Kansas emergency room nurse, volunteered to sit with an agitated patient.
The patient hit Simpson so hard her glasses were broken and she worked the final four hours of her shift with a concussion. She missed three months of work with a head injury.
When Simpson returned, she learned that prosecutors had dropped the case after initially pressing charges.
Her story is not unusual. In hospitals across Kansas and the United States, violence against healthcare workers is commonplace, on the rise and often unreported. Prosecutors won’t pursue the cases and workers worry about future interactions with those patients, administrators say.
In response, Kansas lawmakers are considering new criminal penalties for interference with hospitals and assaults against hospital workers. Essentially, attacking a hospital worker would carry the same legal weight as attacking a police officer or other first responder.
“We already have a healthcare shortage,” said Rep. Susan Ruiz, a Lenexa Democrat and one of 19 sponsors of the bill. “Healthcare workers are saying we can’t take this anymore.”
The legislation is supported by law enforcement and healthcare officials across the state.
The climate of rising violence is not a product of the pandemic. Even before the advent of COVID-19, federal data shows, workplace injuries in healthcare outpaced other industries and was rising.
In 2018, healthcare accounted for 73% of non-fatal workplace injuries from violence. Just over 10% of every 10,000 healthcare workers – roughly 1 in every 1,000 – missed work because of non-fatal workplace violence.
More recent data isn’t available, but hospital administrators and workers said they’ve seen increased aggression in the past two years — much like the deterioration in passenger behavior encountered by airline crews — fueled by rising anger with pandemic restrictions and by related mental health problems.
“The building of stress has led to violence happening more frequently - this has always been happening - people are just less able to cope,” said Stephanie Wise, Chief Nursing Officer at Advent Health in Shawnee.
Rep. Susan Concannon, a Beloit Republican who sponsored the bill, said the rising violence in the pandemic came as part of her motivation.
“What we’re seeing now are just angry people who are not getting the drugs that they want and angry at their diagnosis who are lashing out at their healthcare providers,” Concannon said. “This is just one piece of it. We need to have a public safety campaign and communication that this isn’t acceptable.”
The threat and reality of violence, what Wise described as an “innate sense of insecurity,” only adds to the ongoing staffing crisis in healthcare.
Testifying to lawmakers last month, healthcare workers described the attacks they and their coworkers had endured.
Jamie Potter, a nurse at Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka, was beaten over the head with a chair while other workers tried in vain to pull a patient off of her. Her assailant was out of jail before she was released from the hospital.
Wise said earlier in her career a drunk patient jumped out of bed, pulled her IV’s out and slapped a bloody hand across her face.
A family member threatened to kill a surgeon if his mother did not recover from the operation.
And countless punches to the face, scratches, and damage to equipment.
“We’re often the punching bags out there,” said Daytha Wilson, a nurse at Ascension Via Christi in Wichita. In 2017 she had to call a trauma alert after a patient punched a nurse, causing a nasal fracture and seizure.
In many instances, however, healthcare workers don’t pursue criminal charges against their assailants. Time and again, they told lawmakers, police have discouraged them from pursuing criminal cases because they won’t go anywhere.
“We don’t report because it’s too much of a hassle,” Simpson told Kansas lawmakers last month.
Nurses and other health professionals worry about the time spent in court and the possibility they may find themselves once again treating the patient they pressed charges against.
“I don’t think we have any idea of the magnitude of the actual problem with violence against healthcare workers in this state because I think many times it goes unreported,” Wise said.
Proposed legislation in Kansas would increase penalties for battery against healthcare workers from a class A to class B misdemeanor. Class A misdemeanors carry up to 1 year of jail time while class B misdemeanors are a maximum of six months. It would also establish a new offense: intentional conduct that interferes with the conduct of a hospital.
The result, proponents say, would be a law that allows hospitals to pursue charges for actions taken against their employees, ensuring more stringent penalties and perhaps a deterrent effect against further crimes.
“Those voluntary behaviors will not change unless we start holding people accountable,” said Morgan Gerhardt, director of the emergency department at Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka.
Though the bill had no vocal opponents, Rep. Boog Highberger, a Lawrence Democrat, said he worried that it would create new penalties without actually solving a problem.
Rep. Fred Patton, a Topeka Republican and chair of the House Judiciary Committee agreed that that was a possibility.
“People come to us when maybe prosecutors aren’t charging crimes so we elevate the level of the crime which does sometimes encourage prosecutors,” Patton said. “Lots of time, I assume in those situations, people are not being good in hospitals they’re not going to think, what’s the punishment. But hopefully it’ll help.”
But proponents of the legislation called it a first step. Ed Klumpp, a lobbyist for Kansas law enforcement said it would send a message.
Chris Ruder, Chief Operating Officer at the University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City, said he hoped it would yield more accountability.
“This may look at things that aren’t considered and say this is serious. We have to protect and take care of people in our communities,” he said.
This story was originally published March 9, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
