IN THE murky world of patients attacking health staff lie disparate views on how to deal with the problem. “Lock them up” is one solution.
GP (July 6) says that 73 per cent of GPs want patients who assault them to receive mandatory jail sentences except where patients have a history of mental illness.
Dr Laurence Buckman, acting chairman of the British Medical Association’s GP Committee (GPC), disagrees with mandatory imprisonment, saying that it will hamper judges.
But Dr Brian Dunn, chairman of GPC Northern Ireland, is in favour. “People have to get the message that if they assault us, they should go to prison,” he says.
Richard Hampton, NHS head of security management, says: “Many GPs don’t report incidents. There needs to be a cultural change within the NHS because it is not acceptable for GPs to think [that] being assaulted is part of the job.”
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Pulse (July 5) reports that attacks on GPs by their patients repeatedly go unreported. Dr Beth McCarron-Nash, a GP in Devon, explains: “Patients who are unwell are often under stress and not their normal selves. They might have drug or alcohol problems and so GPs give them the benefit of the doubt if they become aggressive.”
While almost a third of GPs say that the problem has grown worse over the past 12 months, more than half of community nurses believe that the risk of violence and abuse at work has gone up in the past two years, reports Nursing Standard (July 4). Sheelagh Brewer, the Royal College of Nursing’s senior employment relations adviser, says that NHS organisations fail to give staff access to mobile phones and location devices that could make their lives much safer.