HSE fined €23,000 over attack on nurses by a patient

3 comments
  1. When I did my Psych placement, I was attacked – they didn’t even fill out an incident form, even though I was only a student. And they never told the college either, I subsequently found out.

    One of them just remarked *”Now you’ve got your stripes”*.

    Mind you, the day before I’d seen a patient literally pull a clump of hair out of a nurses head, so let’s just say violence against staff was normalised somewhat.

  2. This kind of situation is (or used be to at least) pretty common as far as I know.

    I know a good few nurses who’ve worked in situations with unstable or mentally regressive patients. Bites, kicks, shoves, scratches, pulling at hair etc. Not every day, but common enough.

    It seemed to just be accepted by the girls as part of the job. It wasn’t the patients fault and you couldn’t blame them, you could never really be fully protected from it and any serious restrictions trying to protect them generally just got in the way and completely destroyed the trust.

    They all seemed to just accept that If you chose to work with vulnerable people like that, sometimes the odd minor injury was part of the job.

    Mad respect for Nurses and Carers though, it’s more a calling than a job.
    The same standard workplace practices as most people would expect never seemed to be applicable to them and they never seemed to mind.

  3. Stuff like this is definitely not good, but why was the HSE fined? It’s not like it’s their fault these facilities don’t properly handle the staff being attacked.

    Am I missing something here?

Leave a Reply