Assaults of employees and patients at Cambridge Health Alliance facilities spiked in March, reaching a peak of 75 incidents, or an average of more than two a day. Chief executive Assaad Sayah made a rare disclosure about the problem, saying at a public meeting last month that the health care system was experiencing a surge. A broader look shows that years of efforts by the Alliance to reduce violence have paid off, with the average number of physical assaults dropping from almost 100 a month in the first six months of 2023 to 30 a month in the past 15 months, spokesperson David Cecere said.
The March figure was an “outlier,” Cecere said. It was caused by “higher-than-usual assaults in two inpatient psychiatry units and the aggressive behavior of a small number of patients,” he said. Sayah’s statements at a board of trustees committee meeting indirectly backed that up.
Commenting on a presentation by Cambridge police about their efforts to divert mentally ill people in crisis from the criminal justice system, Sayah said “some of them belong in jail, when you have one person who shuts down an entire unit.”
Another indication that March was unusual: In April the number of physical assaults tumbled to 26. The March and April figures were provided by CHA in response to a public records request.
“Through and after the Covid pandemic, our employees experienced significant increases in physical and verbal assaults,” Cecere said in an email. “We have invested considerably in efforts to build our safety culture, with training for all staff and providers on the importance of speaking up with concerns. We have introduced processes across our system to strengthen the ability to learn about and respond to problems in real time and put standard operating procedures in place to ensure that we are reliably providing high quality, safe care. Consequently, over the last 12 quarters, we have seen reductions in physical assaults affecting employees and patients.”
Hospitals across the country have experienced an increase in violence against employees since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, according to the American Hospital Association. The organization supports a federal law that would bar attacks against health care employees, similar to laws protecting airline workers.
In Massachusetts, a coalition of organizations representing hospitals and health care worker unions met with legislators at the State House last month to support a bill requiring employers to develop plans to protect employees and also making it a felony to “knowingly and intentionally” assault a health care worker on duty. The measure would not apply to people in a mental crisis “acting outside their usual judgement,” according to the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association.
The association said a Massachusetts hospital worker is assaulted or threatened every 36 minutes. That would put the Alliance well below the average number of attacks, even at the peak in March.
Health care leaders and workers have focused on violence against employees. The CHA figures, though, show physical attacks against patients admitted to the hospital as well, apparently by other patients. In March there were 23 assaults of inpatients; there were five each in January and February, and nine in April. One emergency department patient was assaulted each month in February, March and April.
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