Safety First Following California Hospital Workers’ Win
August 22, 2012
This post from the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD)/AFSCME Local 206 was written by Sue Wilson, UAPD Communications Specialist.
NAPA, Calif. – No one should have to go to work worried that they might be strangled to death. Yet this has been the fear of employees at Napa State Hospital – a facility for the mentally ill – after the horrifying murder of one of their colleagues on the job.
This week, after nearly two years of protests, the workers who are members of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD)/ Local 206 and Local 2620 have achieved one of the primary goals in their campaign for safety improvements at the violence-plagued facility: a safe, campus-wide personal alarm system for staff. This technology could have saved the life of psychiatric technician Donna Gross, who was strangled by a patient on hospital grounds in 2010.
The alarm system launch was marred initially by the insistence of Department of State Hospital (DSH) managers that Napa staff wear their personal alarm devices on a lanyard around the neck, despite workers repeated insistence that the lanyards themselves posed a strangulation hazard.
"You don't wear a tie if you're working with patients on a psychiatric unit. Now everyone is going to have the equivalent of a tie," warned Dr. Richard Frishman, a psychiatrist and UAPD member, in a recent Los Angeles Times article.
Only when a lanyard was used in an attack on a psychiatric technician this past Wednesday did hospital officials relent and offer workers the option of attaching their personal alarm device at waist level. This latest life-threatening event came just two days after DSH ignored a worker-filed safety grievance that asked the department to postpone the alarm system launch until a safe attachment device could be offered. The department relented after Wednesday's lanyard attack drew intense attention from the media and criticism from elected officials.
"It took two years of us fighting with the Department of State Hospitals to get an alarm system, and it took this latest attack to get them to add something as simple as a belt attachment,” said Dr. Frishman. “We really appreciate the support we've gotten from the community and our elected leaders in this.”
UAPD and AFSCME Local 2620, which are part of the Safety Now Coalition, will continue to pursue other safety improvements at Napa State Hospital and the other DSH facilities.
Dr. Stuart A. Bussey, president of UAPD, which represents hundreds of psychiatrists and other physicians who care for DSH patients, added: "This alarm system is an important first step, but there are still many other safety problems to fix at Napa and the other hospitals. We hope DSH has learned a lesson about listening to the input of doctors and other workers.”
