New York City's Metropolitan Hospital psychiatric staff members are quitting, citing an understaffed environment incapable of accommodating patient needs and incidents that have left staff injured, local news source Gothamist reported July 19.
"When you don't have the support that you need and then you run into another crisis, it's always in the back of your head, like, 'I don't want to get hurt again,'" Humberto Garcia, RN, a former inpatient psychiatric nurse at Metropolitan Hospital, told Gothamist.
While splitting up an altercation between patients, Mr. Garcia ended up with a black eye and an injured shoulder, taking him out of work for a month.
According to Gothamist, staff members said violent incidents have forced employees to miss thousands of work days over the past four years and have led many psychiatric staff members to leave.
Gothamist reported that most of the employees interviewed said they had been injured multiple times during violent incidents, which are reported to the New York State Department of Labor along with other workplace injuries.
In 2020, violent incidents against staff accounted for more than half of all the days staff were out due to workplace injury at the hospital that year.
The number of violent incidents reported over the last four years:
|
Year |
Violent incidents |
|
2018 |
21 |
|
2019 |
21 |
|
2020 |
36 |
|
2021 |
27 |
The union representing staff at the hospital said that this year, behavioral health staff are filing more formal complaints for unsafe conditions, which protect staff from liability if patients get injured.
About 1 in 5 protests filed this year at Metropolitan Hospital came from the behavioral health units, with most mentioning "assaultive behavior in addition to understaffing."
Stephanie Buhle, a spokesperson for NYC Health+Hospitals, told Gothamist that the health system is aware of safety concerns at Metropolitan and is already working to address them.
"This subject about staffing safety in the psych units is brought to each meeting [with management]," Jannete Marin, the hospital union president, told Gothamist. "Supposedly, in every meeting they're going to address it … and the numbers keep on adding up, and nothing has been done."