Local 500 President Nancy Pridham during an October 2008 press conference addressing assaults at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Six years later the same problems persist with the union calling on the Ministry of Labour to charge the employer under the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
Client Empowerment Council at Ottawa’s psychiatric hospital say they became advocates for the safety of the care team because a “safe place for staff members increased patient safety as well.”
In a statement issued by The Royal November 26, mental health advocate Claude Lurette spoke about his own regret at lashing out at others while a patient at the hospital. “It wasn’t until I became solid in my own recovery of living with bi-polar disorder that I came to understand that the best thing I can do is to own my behaviour and learn what I need to learn in order to minimize the chances of it happening again,” he writes. “It is hard to find the words to express how much I appreciate the nurses and other staff who took care of me even when my behaviour was unpredictable.”
The Royal was publicly responding to the court proceedings following charges laid against the hospital under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. In the alleged incident a patient choked and assaulted two nurses and a support worker in the Royal’s Recovery Unit.
The Royal faces numerous charges around failing to take reasonable precautions to protect worker safety.
Their woes may not be entirely over with these court proceedings. In October, a nurse at the Royal’s Brockville site was allegedly stabbed multiple times in the neck, narrowly missing her carotid artery. She survived the encounter, but the hospital has received an extraordinary interim order by the Ontario Labour Relations Board to provide formal security in the nurse’s unit 24-7.
Stories about patient assaults are always very difficult because of the risk of further stigmatizing persons with mental illness. The truth is that a person with mental illness is more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator of it. With so few beds left in Ontario’s psychiatric hospitals, there is a filtering process that takes place so that patients finding their way into one of these beds are more likely to be a risk to themselves or to others. That should be a call to administrators to step up their efforts to keep everyone safe.
OPSEU Diablogue 