Posted on 10/21/22
| News Source: WMAR2NEWS
Baltimore's Gregory Jasani considers himself "very lucky" to have never been a victim of violence while working as an ER doctor in Maryland. After all, a recent poll showed more than 50 percent of his colleagues have.
"I certainly saw a lot of it in my training and my day-to-day job. As you can imagine, an emergency department in inner-city Baltimore sees a lot of, I guess you consider them high-risk patients," said Jasani, now an assistant professor in the UMD School of Medicine who worked for three years in their emergency department and also worked in a small community hospital in Prince George's County.
He recalled three of his colleagues who had been attacked by the patients they were trying to help.
"When I was in my training, there was a nurse, friend of mine, who actually got kicked in the chest by a patient. She needed to have X-rays just to make sure she didn't have any broken ribs. Another colleague was tackled by a patient suffering from an acute... psychiatric illness who felt, for whatever reason, that a sacrifice had to be offered - for what I don't know, but [the patient] decided that my nursing friend was going to be that sacrifice. And then a third colleague was actually choked by a patient that we Narcaned [administered the anti-opioid treatment Narcan] in the street in front of our emergency department. We got called out that there was a person slumped over unconscious in their car and we gave him some Narcan, which worked, woke him up, but then he reached out and began choking the nurse... [Violence] is very prevalent in the emergency department."
Jasani is far from alone. A recent poll done by the American College of Emergency Physicians showed 85 percent of ER doctors believe the rate of violence has increased in the past five years, and 45 percent said it has increased greatly.