Stopping Health Care Violence with Sheila Wilson
Fighting to Stop Violence in the Healthcare System
Sheila Wilson has been a nurse for decades, but is still out there advocating and supporting nurses. Have you been a victim of healthcare violence and didn’t get the support you needed? Sheila will talk about how to find resources and continues to fight to decrease the incidence of assault and battery of our bedside nurses.
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About Sheila
Sheila Wilson is a registered nurse who has served in both clinical and administrative management positions, as well as executive leadership roles, for over 30 years. As a clinician and in-patient care manager, she has worked tirelessly with HIV/AIDS, TB and substance abuse patients, as well as under-served populations in the Boston area. Ms. Wilson earned her Bachelor of Science degree in nursing at the University of Massachusetts and her MPH from the School of Public Health at Boston University.
I created Stop Health Care Violence in 2009 to bring more awareness to the plight of the Health Care Workers. In 2018 Stop Health Care Violence became a Non-Profit. The mission of our Non-Profit is to educate and inform the public on the alarming epidemic committed against healthcare personnel. We want to provide support and advocacy for victims and lobby for change.
Links
- Stop Healthcare Violence on the web and Facebook
- Heal the Healer Facebook group
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Speaker 1:
Welcome to Don't Eat Your Young, a nursing podcast with your host, Beth Quaas. Before we get started, we have a few quick notes. Don't Eat Your Young is a listener-supported podcast. To learn more about becoming a member and the perks available to you for becoming a patron yourself, visit Patreon.com/don'teatyouryoung. You can learn more about the show, share your story to join Beth as a guest, or connect with our wonderful community in our Facebook group. You can find all those links and more at Donteatyouryoung.com. And now, on with the show.
Beth Quaas:
Hello and welcome back to Don't Eat Your young. I'm your host Beth Quaas. Today I'm delighted to have Sheila Wilson here. She's a registered nurse who has served both clinical administrative management positions, as well as executive leadership roles for over 30 years. She created Stop Healthcare Violence in 2009, which turned into a nonprofit in 2018. She wants to educate and inform the public on the alarming epidemic committed against healthcare personnel. And she wants to provide support and advocacy for victims and lobby for change. We are so excited to have Sheila here today. Sheila Wilson, welcome to Don't Eat Your Young.
Sheila Wilson:
Thank you so much for having me here, Beth. This is really awesome, thank you.
Beth Quaas:
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your nursing career.
Sheila Wilson:
Well, I started, I don't know how old you are, but I'm probably older and have been a nurse longer than you have been around. But I have had one of the greatest nursing careers, because I've done a lot in it. I started out well, first in high school, I wanted to become a nurse. And I was told that I couldn't, I took a test and they didn't think I was suited to be a nurse. So I ended up not becoming a nurse when all my other friends were a nurse in school. But I got married, had a bunch of kids. And then when I was in my 30s, I decided that I'm going to go for it. I heard a friend of mine say it. And we were at a baseball club with our kids, and she was going to nursing school in the evening. So she showed me how to do it. She borrowed some uniforms for me, got me some books, and then I was off and running.
Beth Quaas:
That's amazing.
Sheila Wilson:
And I have so much. It's amazing. I have gone medical, I have done units. And the last I worked in the hospital was the emergency room. And I spent many years there, but I was also, I worked on three different detoxes, and I wanted to learn about alcoholism, because there was plenty in my family that took a drink and all of a sudden they became different people. And I also went into all sorts of areas to do TB testing and the story can go on and on. I've just had a fabulous career, and I'm still working.
Beth Quaas:
You have done a lot.
Sheila Wilson:
I have done a lot.
Beth Quaas:
What are you doing now?
Sheila Wilson:
Well now it's kind of, I don't want to say it's easier than the ER, or out walking around the community, but I do occupational health.
Beth Quaas:
Nice.
Sheila Wilson:
Not the real workman's comp and all that. The biggest problem I had with occupational health is short-term disability, STD. When you work in the ER, that's not what STD stands for.
Beth Quaas:
Absolutely.
Sheila Wilson:
So it was kind of a learning curve there. But I have had a great, great career in nursing. I hope I can continue and not that my age can interfere with anything, because nurses can do just about anything.
Beth Quaas:
I totally agree with that. And you have done a lot for your community too. We talked before, and you talked some about going out in your community and working with aids patients, HIV patients. And did you see much of a correlation when COVID first hit in how we treated patients? Do you think we treated patients differently?
Sheila Wilson:
Because of my medical condition at that time, I didn't do much with the pandemic, but I had talked with several nurses, and they said it was so difficult. Well, number one, with the lack of personal protection. When they had to wear, one nurse, not an N95, if you remember the N95s, we used to get tested for, before we even got the mask on, they didn't have N95s, they had the regular masks. And they had to wear that for weeks and months at a time. And then there was talk about what they would, they had to put it in a Tupperware container, or they had to do it in a paper bag. And then they started sprinkling chemicals on them so that they could wear them longer. And I don't know whose idea any of this is. But I have an issue of the fact that not one nurse, or is there anything being said about checking their respiratory systems for the ones that have been working from day one in the pandemic.
To me, that only makes common sense, check your nurses. And the nurses didn't have enough staff. I've talked to many, many nurses, and the ones in the units, the ICUs, they didn't have enough nurses to prone the patient so that they could breathe better. The doctors would come to the door, they would never come in. So me not being there, I mean, how do you know that your patient was evaluated by a physician, and how can he write that if he hasn't put his hands on it? And maybe that's old school, maybe technology has changed and doctors can see through wooden doors and stuff like that. I don't know. I always would check their history and physical and make sure not that I agreed with it, but that I wasn't missing anything that they saw. But how can a doctor evaluate through a doorway? Not even an open doorway.
Beth Quaas:
Right. The nurses were in there, the nurses' aide were in there, thank goodness for those people that were in there taking care of patients.
Sheila Wilson:
You got that right.
Beth Quaas:
You have to put your hands on, you have to see things up close. You can't look at something from six feet away. And so thank goodness for them. I know it's been a struggle. We have so many people right now dealing with the after effects of what they went through that first year, but it continues today as well.
Sheila Wilson:
Yes, yes. And it certainly is.
Beth Quaas:
And short-staffing is nothing new.
Sheila Wilson:
I was just talking to a nurse that her story was horrific. She was assaulted terribly, and her coworkers never really even looked at her. And when she finally, she was unconscious, when she finally was able to open her eyes and realize that, where am I? And she was very foggy and everything else, the patient has assaulted her so bad. And she got up on her knees and she finally went to the nurse's station and nobody really looked at her. Nobody said nothing. And she ended up getting dropped off by a police officer at the emergency room. Supervisor was there, but she was basically letting the nurse triage herself. And usually as a nurse, you can kind of, all you have to do is look in somebody's eyes. And you'll know when they're not quite right. When I said, "Why didn't the staff help you in anyway?" And she said, "Well, maybe because we didn't have enough staff and not enough people around."
And then you think to yourself, "Well, what if I had a patient there? What if I had a family member in that hospital?" Does that mean that my family member that I put there, because I wanted them to have good care, are they getting good care? They aren't. And it's like, "Oh my God, this is 2021. And we're doing this like it's 1906 or something?" It's not right. I mean, I don't know what to you about that. It's tough.
Beth Quaas:
And it's such a huge problem. We'd have a hard time defining how to tackle that problem and where to start.
Sheila Wilson:
Well, if you're talking about assaulting patients, there's an awful lot of simple things that hospitals can do. And if it's all about the bottom line, I don't know what they do with the bottom line money. We always say, "Oh, maybe the CEO, or maybe so and so pockets it and all that." And I would hate to believe something like that. I mean, we live in America, and healthcare should be very important to everybody, but why aren't the hospitals safe for staff or patients? And that's what I don't understand. So where does the money go? You have any idea?
Beth Quaas:
I have no idea. I have a lot of things I'd like to do with that money to help ease the crisis that we're in right now. So how did you get involved in advocating for Healthcare Workers Against Violence?
Sheila Wilson:
I started back in probably 2000, I'd say 2007, 2008. And I was working the ER at the time, and there was two other nurses that we all, two of us had been assaulted. One was, she said, no, she really didn't get assaulted, but well, every day there was something going on. Now, when I say that, I mean, you'd hear somebody, they got pinched in their butt, or maybe they got a slap across their face. These are things that you didn't call in sick for the next day, but that shouldn't have happened. And it wasn't like, they weren't complaining about the patient that come in with a low blood sugar. These people, they aren't coherent. And so their arms are flailing around and you could get hurt by that, but you're aware of that.
The same as somebody with seizures, you can't always be prepared at that second when maybe an arm would get loose and he would hit you and all that, or the Alzheimer patient. You know as a nurse or a medical assistant, you don't go traipsing in and start yelling, "Oh, we're going to do this. And we're going to do that." It's slow. It's easy. You always, the patient is the most important person right then and there. Just take care of that patient, and make sure you know what you're doing. And so those aren't the patients that were hurting us. And it wasn't always the alcoholic. I worked in three different detoxes. I was the only nurse for like 30 patients. I was never assaulted in a detox. So why was I assaulted by somebody that maybe had too many to drink? And he fell off a stool at the bar room. Well, you fell off your stool. Now you're going to spend the night in the ER? Oh, well, that's up to the doctors, I guess.
So we found out that the three of us, we talked to the staff and we found out that one of the biggest thing was when we called for security to help us, they had to come from either the eighth floor, the seventh floor down in a different unit, halfway across the building. At the time, we had workplace violence committee meetings, one of our nurses used to be a shop steward at Boston Medical. And I only say that because Boston Medical is a big hospital, and they take care of a lot of wonderful patients. And there's a lot of tough patients there, but they take care of their patients. This girl, she was as hard as a rock. So nothing would frighten her, because she was a shop steward there.
The three of us got together. And so we decided we needed to have a security guard in the emergency room, 24-7. And it took a lot of work to work together to get this done. And to shorten the story, it got done. It didn't get done overnight, but the ER still now has a guard got 24 hours a day. However, things have changed, because I keep in contact with some of the nurses, and instead of the security guards coming and helping us, they are hands off. So now I don't know what they do. What can a security guard do? I mean, if he's in uniform, maybe he can scare the patients, just stand there and say, "We're going to call the Boston police if you don't behave." And then you think to yourself, well is that really going to work? Because he's still punching me. Can you come help me? And I would imagine it's more of the liability, because maybe people sued. Nobody told me any of that. So as that continued, we knew more and more nurses were getting assaulted.
More people would be more willing to talk to me about, a nurse come up to me and she said, this will jump into a different issue. This nurse come up to me and she said, "Sheila, this patient in room five just slapped me. And look it, you can still see the marks on my neck." And so I did. And I said, "Are you okay? Have you made out a report?" Everything should be documented, because the hospital can't do anything if you're not documented. So the girl said, "No, I will do that right now." So off she went, but yet the charge nurse said to me, "She wasn't hit that hard, what is she complaining about?" So now if you stop and think about that dilemma, I've got a nurse that both mothers, both married, both doing their own things on different sides of getting assaulted.
To this day, that still is there. There's an awful lot of nurses that think, well, it's part of the job. It's not part of the job. It should have never been part of the job. And then the other thing would be, well, why should I document it? Nobody ever returns my call. And that also is true. So you think to yourself that's a huge dilemma, and how do you change that?
Beth Quaas:
I agree. And I think we've also, if something happens in the hospital, say a Sentinel event, the first thing I think that the nurses asked is how could you have prevented this?
Sheila Wilson:
That's exactly. I have got documentation of many nurses would say the same thing. That's exactly what they happened. That you end up walking out of these meetings feeling guilty, and you stop and think, "What could I have prevented?" You couldn't have prevented anything. You walk in the room to take care of the patient, and he punches you in the face. What could you have done? Maybe I should have taken part of my uniform off or something. Maybe that would've taken care of his attention. I don't know. And they've got it down pat, how to make a nurse feel like maybe it was her fault.
Beth Quaas:
The person that really needs the support at that time is the victim. And it seems that we focus too much on not supporting that person, and trying to blame someone.
Sheila Wilson:
Right. But why do we do that? Why can't the powers to be understand that people, when they come into say in the emergency room, I know more on that. And they're worried, they're sick to death. You don't ever know what's happening to them. And so as a nurse and medical assistant and respiratory and everybody, x-ray techs, they're all taking care of those patients. The patient starts to hurt you. And you don't even know that. I mean you know you're getting hurt, but you don't understand it. So how is it your fault? And why does the hospital have to feel as though they have to make us to be the guilty ones?
Beth Quaas:
Well, and like you said, some nurses think it's okay. And so what we permit, we allow, and that's part of the problem.
Sheila Wilson:
Right. You got that, but I have seen nurses picked up and thrown up against the wall and one of them came out and she said, "I'm okay, no problem." Making out a report? Nope. Nope. I'm okay. But I saw that happen, tiny little thing. He picked her right up, threw her right up against the wall. She slid down the wall. Another patient I took care of, she came from one of the units, and she said, "I don't want my husband, if I hear my husband's voice, I'm going to disappear here." She's not going to stay on the stretcher. I said, "Well, what do you mean?" And she says, "If my husband knows that I'm here, and I was assaulted by a patient, he's going to make me quit." And she said, "He doesn't feel as though a job should interfere with my life. I'm a cancer survivor. I'm all set with my chemo, radiation, everything." And she says, "But I love what I do."
So does that mean that she's going to continue allowing patients? Now that girl was picked up, thrown across the bed, not on the bed, but in the air, across the room and hit the wall. The other one I just spoke about was only maybe a matter of three feet. This one had to be six feet or maybe seven feet. So what makes a nurse do that, accept that type of abuse-
Beth Quaas:
And how do we help them?
Sheila Wilson:
Well, that's it. Then you get into domestic violence. Maybe that's the way they're treated at home. And where is our guideline? Do we talk about that? Do we accept the fact that, okay, Sally here let's any patient assault her and she thinks nothing about it, but Susie over here, if somebody puts their hand on her, she starts complaining and writes out all the reports. So without the staff, and without the, I don't know, maybe the education of what is it to be like a domestic violence patient? And instead of asking, "Why don't you leave that situation?" I guess the bigger question is why do you stay?
Beth Quaas:
Good question.
Sheila Wilson:
It's the same as nursing. Why do we stay into these positions that nobody cares whether you get hurt? And I mean, just so many simple things could be done. It would be just like putting, okay, Joe Smith decides he's going to beat the living daylights out of me. So now Joe Smith, even though I think it wasn't OSHA, it was somebody else. One of the other people that come in and checked the hospitals, I can't remember what they were, but you're not supposed to write a patient's name in a notebook. I think we used to keep the patient's name in our lockers, but every patient that assaults another healthcare worker should be tapped in that chart.
So that when you open up that chart, you should be able to see that this person has assaulted somebody. And not all hospitals have that. Some hospitals have it, but not all hospitals. And then there's a lot of hospitals that have it, but don't do too much about it. This one sent Joe Blow there., he assaulted Sally Slow, and she was hospitalized for only 10 days. So that wasn't too bad. But why is this person still allowed to come without a security guard that is not hands off? Maybe is secured, now in different countries, I know for a fact that they have security guards that will walk with the patient, and the patient has to pay for it. If not him or her, then it's the family that has to pay for that security guard, I mean, it's a hospital bill. It's not the security guard, but the security guard is to protect him. And if one isn't enough, they get assigned two security guards. And that person is with him the whole time so he doesn't assault people.
Beth Quaas:
Well, we definitely know things need to change. So talk to us a little bit about Stop Healthcare Violence, and what you are doing in that nonprofit.
Sheila Wilson:
Stop Healthcare Violence, our mission is basically let the public know what is going on, and then talk to these nurses and see what they need. Even though I've been doing this since 2008, now that's a few years, when you talk to people and they say to you, "What do you mean you get assaulted?" Well, our patients hit us. What do you mean your patients hit you? Well, they're frustrated and they want to get served faster. Or they didn't like what we were going to give them. And I said that I don't think that's true. And so you kind of say, oh, okay. I can't explain it any better than what I'm telling you. That violence goes on in the emergency room.
Now, what I don't want to do is scare patients, because if the patients know, but in reality, Beth, where do you think these other patients are roaming the floors, the nurse is taking care of them, but we're kind of like short-staffed now. So who's watching this one, maybe they're fumbling through your belongings in the locker. Who knows what they're doing? I mean, certainly you work in a hospital still, right?
Beth Quaas:
Right.
Sheila Wilson:
And when I was working on the medical floors, you kind of kept track of the people, but you couldn't keep track of everybody, and things do get stolen. And you don't know if they're looking at you while you're sleeping and you have to pay attention.
Beth Quaas:
Right. It is a safety issue, not just for nurses, but like you said, the other patients in the hospital as well. Violence can come from patients, it can come from family members, visitors in the hospital. So I'll tell you, Sheila, you hit the nail on the head. Healthcare workers are getting assaulted. That is real.
Sheila Wilson:
Yes it is.
Beth Quaas:
And it needs to stop. And I know there are many bills trying to be pushed through to protect healthcare workers. Does your nonprofit work on that at all?
Sheila Wilson:
I used to be, before I became a nonprofit, because I've only been a nonprofit for a couple years now. Some of the legislators used to call me by name as I walked up the state house. And I could never understand why they thought it wasn't important. And I guess I understand because they really don't think that it's happening. Unless one of their family members do it. Now, a couple of stories that one nurse never told her family she ever got assaulted. And one day she was getting undressed, and her grandson, she said he could come in and he happened to see some bruises on her back. And she said, "I couldn't tell him. I could not tell him that a patient hit me and kicked me." I said, "Why?" And she says, "Well, he's little. And he should not know." Well, I can't go into family counseling. So she didn't tell him and she didn't tell her daughter or anybody else that was living in the home.
So everybody goes home, covers up their bruises, their scratches, and life goes on. It's like close that book and nobody's the wiser. But it still happens. If the hospital only did small amounts. I mean the nurses, one nurse told me they had a metal detector, and that was a gift. But the gift ended up in the attic, or the top floor of the hospital because the hospital didn't want to pay the person to man the metal detector. And you think, "Oh, well maybe if there was a metal detector when Elise Wilson got stabbed 11 times as a triage nurse, maybe that wouldn't have happened to her." Maybe if there was a security guy that walked the parking lots and kept an eye on the visitors, he would've noticed the kid in his car sharpening up his knife. Maybe they would've noticed that the video camera is not watching the parking lot at the cars that are parked there that the employees are using the parking lot for.
And the camera is viewing what's in the dumpster instead of viewing the parking lot, maybe they could have saved somebody from being assaulted in the parking lot. That's not a hard thing to look at. Check your equipment. Now, nurses were complaining that they were getting panic buttons on their badges. So that is really good. That's been out for years and years, a panic button, and it should alert you to where you are exactly at that time. But some of the buttons didn't come with that feature. They only came with a light. And so they didn't have that feature. So what good was that? And the hospital was not going to pay for that.
Beth Quaas:
And it's only as good if you have the security personnel to respond to those calls, you have to staff that up.
Sheila Wilson:
But if the security guards are hands off, and then what about the security guards that now have a policy that they can carry tasers, but they can't tase unless they see a gun or a knife?
Beth Quaas:
That's a little too late.
Sheila Wilson:
Yeah. I mean what happened to the hands and the feet? Don't we still consider them weapons?
Beth Quaas:
Absolutely.
Sheila Wilson:
I don't know. There's so many hospitals out there. All the hospitals have different ways of dealing with patients like this.
Beth Quaas:
Right. And we've moved so far away from restraining patients that you almost need an act of Congress to do that because of patient rights. But what about nurses' rights? What about healthcare workers' rights? We've forgotten about them.
Sheila Wilson:
We have. In Massachusetts, we have a puppy dog bill, and this puppy was found and it was beaten and it was hungry, and the public just all fell in love with this puppy. And so we have a felony law, if you hurt a puppy or dog, and there's rules and the regulations and all of that with it, but you could go to jail for that. But in the state of Massachusetts Beth, I fought for many years to get a felony law in the state of Massachusetts. And they passed looka bills instead of saying, yeah, 2010 governor Deval Patrick made it a misdemeanor. And as I've trotted off into the state house trying ask why we aren't doing it, they said, "Well, a misdemeanor isn't all that bad you know." Well, one fellow said to us that, well, if they have a felony, they can't get food stamps. And that's my issue?
Maybe you ought to get a job. But you have to stop and think again, too, as I know that you probably do is what about that person? Why did he hit us? What was the issue? It's not just a drug addict. It's not the mentally ill. I mean if the mental health patient can request going to the bathroom, can request having a meal, request all of these things, why can't he not hit us? How can that, we've gone to court and that's one of the issues they say, the judge will come back and say, "Well, I think he's incompetent of all that." Well, what do you mean he's incompetent? He got here. I mean, where is that competency level? And you start thinking, "Well, maybe I'm a little incompetent." I don't know Beth.
Beth Quaas:
Well, I so appreciate all the work you're doing to bring this to light, because I think change only happens the more people know and the more they're educated, and I think you are doing great work in what you're doing. And I appreciate that. So thank you, Sheila.
Sheila Wilson:
Well, I appreciate you inviting me to come on. I don't know if the fact that I'm doing interviews with Passionate World talk radio and get a lot of the nurses, the ones that will admit that they've been assaulted and they've been hurt. And I still do some writing. And I mean, there's an awful lot. And in my board meeting, there's a lot going on. We have Stop Healthcare Violence Facebook, and Heal the Healer. We're going to have one of the board members that is a certified yoga instructor, and she will be on Heal the Healer, and it will be all for free. And it's three different, the mat, I don't know if you do any yoga, the chair, the wall and the mat. And she's really good.
Beth Quaas:
That's amazing.
Sheila Wilson:
And I'm hoping that we'll get a qigong person and they'll be there for free and anything to help the nurses with their anxiety.
Beth Quaas:
There's a lot that goes into the aftercare of people that have been through that. And so I hope people can find you and get the help that they need.
Sheila Wilson:
Well, we're always here listening.
Beth Quaas:
Thanks, Sheila so much for being on.
Sheila Wilson:
Thank you so much. And I will talk to you again.
Speaker 1:
Don't Eat Your Young was produced in partnership with True Story FM. Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by the Lighthearts. Find the show, show notes and transcripts at Don'tEatYourYoung.com. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please, consider doing that for our show. But the best thing you could do to support the show is to share it with a friend or colleague. Thank you for listening.
