News Photo by Michael Gonzalez
A MyMichigan office violence poster that reads “Assault is not part of our job. It is a crime” is seen within the MyMichigan Medical Center Alpena entrance foyer final month.

ALPENA — Over the final a number of years, sufferers and guests of MyMichigan Health amenities, together with My Michigan Medical Center Alpena, have doubtless come throughout indicators that learn ‘assault is not part of our job’ or comparable phrases.

This signage is an element of a bigger marketing campaign organized to acknowledge office violence within the healthcare discipline — an issue that’s extra prone to occur to employees, officers say.

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “75 percent of nearly 25,000 workplace assaults reported annually occurred in healthcare and social service settings.”

Sue Lennon, director of worker well being and wellness, and Sherry Warczynski, supervisor of regulatory compliance and an infection prevention, work within the MyMichigan Health system and are a part of the Workplace Violence Committee. They mentioned the staff was created someday between 2017 and 2018, as a consequence of alarming knowledge relating to the danger of staff.

“We deal with some pretty sick patients who are going through some pretty emotional times,” Warczynski mentioned. “And so our risk is a lot higher than any other industry…All these years that was kind of part of being a nurse, you knew you were probably going to get hit, spit, kicked, slapped, bit. It’s just kind of gone to an extreme and you know, healthcare workers shouldn’t have to come to work and fear for their life.”

Lennon mentioned this consciousness marketing campaign isn’t just meant for guests or sufferers, but in addition for workers. An vital side of the problem of office violence within the healthcare discipline, in line with Lennon and Warcynski, is that employees ought to report incidents relatively than leaving them alone to turn out to be an everyday prevalence.

Departments with larger danger of an incident are given particular coaching in collaboration with the Crisis Prevention Institute — a world coaching group that focuses on coaching coping with assaultive and disruptive conduct — to scale back the overall circumstances that occur. Training programs embrace steps to deescalate sufferers and, in excessive circumstances, the process within the occasion of an energetic shooter.

Lennon later mentioned the committee’s mission is to investigate MyMichigan’s knowledge and put it to use to create a safer work surroundings for its employees.

“We’re really ramping up a lot more department-specific education, because our health system is large,” Lennon mentioned. “We have acute care, many outpatient clinics and home care. So really trying to do training and video vignettes that speak to specific areas.”