Of course not.
You know, I work in a small town; the good doctor worked in an urban environment in Winnipeg. In my view of the world, I tend to look at what happens in my little department in Perth, Ontario as a manifestation of what happens in the bigger picture. I can tell you that in our small town, which sees about 30,000 patient visits per year, we often have about three nurses on staff at any one point in time. We're chronically understaffed; it's chronically difficult.... There's no acceptance of illness, because it puts the onus on somebody to fill in that shift. Many of them feel incredibly stressed by their sense of community and commitment to work through illness, through family stress, through psychological difficulties.
In our department, where we have a fantastic, supportive team—intercollegial—many of our nurses are getting fed up with the degree of—I'll be polite, because I'm in mixed company—nonsense that happens on a day-to-day basis. It's true that we don't tend to see a lot of the significant violence, such as you might have seen in Winnipeg, but every day there is verbal abuse, grabbing, kicking, scratching—not always by patients, sometimes by their families—and the nurses are traumatized.
Some of our best nurses, who've been with me for nigh on 10 or 20 years, are thinking that they've had enough now and they're going to leave, because there just isn't enough accountability from the hospital to address the problem. They do feel, as my colleague from the personal support workers mentioned, that if they raise the issue, there will be retribution or their problems will not be taken seriously; therefore, they remain silent. It has become that staff feel it's a normal part of the job, but it is not.
In answer to your question, the obvious answer is no, it's not acceptable.