Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for inviting me on behalf of CFNU. We represent over 200,000 nurses across the country. My name is Linda Silas. I am a proud nurse and a proud New Brunswicker. Thank you to the committee for doing this study. I remember testifying here on other issues. When violence in the workplace was mentioned, it was a surprise to everyone, so we are very pleased to see this.
Workplace violence is a growing epidemic among health care workers as staffing levels heavily decline, patient acuity increases and weak security protocols fail to offer adequate protection. From a Canada-wide survey, 61% of nurses reported abuse, harassment and assault on the job during the last year. A recent survey here in Ontario said that 68% of nurses and personal support workers experienced violence on the job. We know that these numbers are unacceptable.
CFNU members across the country recently shared with me different examples. I literally sent an email to my board telling them I was appearing at the committee on May 14 and asking for any examples that came to mind. Last June a nurse in Newfoundland and Labrador was stabbed multiple times with a pen. Last fall a nurse supervisor in P.E.I., working in a long-term care facility, was punched over and over in the throat and tripped and pinched by a resident. This March, in my own hospital in New Brunswick, a nurse was attacked and strangled for 11 minutes by a patient's spouse before security showed up. Of course, she is still off. In Nova Scotia, violence in some facilities has reached a point where the nurses have begun pursuing charges against patients and family members who strike them. Earlier this month in Manitoba, on three consecutive days a nurse was punched in the stomach by a patient.
Studies in Manitoba also talk about ER, as Dr. Drummond mentioned, where 30% of ER nurses have been physically assaulted once a week in the last year. Last year, a nurse in Saskatchewan was brutally assaulted by a patient to the point where one more blow to his nose would have been fatal. That was March 2018 and he is still not working. He will probably never work again. In March of this year, a patient's visitor brought a gun into a hospital in Alberta. The last time Dr. Drummond and I testified together in front of you, it was about gun control.
We deeply appreciate the support provided by MP Doug Eyolfson for supporting the e-petition that the CFNU recently submitted on violence against health care workers. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for Canada to tackle this crisis, not only for the health care workers from coast to coast to coast who signed the e-petititon but for all Canadians. As we frequently say in nursing, when nurses and health care workers aren't safe, patients aren't safe either. Nurses are even more susceptible to violence in the workplace than any other type of workers who work directly with the public. There were more than 4,000 incidents of serious workplace violence against nurses—serious enough to prevent them from going to work—reported in the last five years. That number—4,000—is higher than for police and firefighters combined. In order to tackle this mounting crisis, we need to go to the heart of the problem. For this we need to have an occupational health and safety lens in both staffing and training.
On January 17 of this year, a nurse and a security guard were assaulted at the Southlake community health centre in Newmarket, Ontario. The nurse, a 33-year-old mother with young children, was struck in the face and suffered skull fractures and a brain bleed. Between April 2018 and December 2018, an eight-month period, we saw 170 violent incidents reported by staff in the same hospital. Nurses describe the hospital as bursting at the seams.
We're calling on the federal government to undertake a comprehensive study in health care human resource planning to determine the current and future shortage and to equip governments across the country with tools to address this shortage. The federal government can, once again, lead by example. lt can implement the highest recognized, comprehensive violence-prevention programs and infrastructure, including hands-on de-escalation training, appropriately trained in-house security, communications devices for staff, wellness programs focused on the physical and mental health of health care workers, and the flagging of patients with a history of violence.
We are calling on this committee to recommend that the federal government legislate national minimum standards of security training for health care environments. To ensure that positive training programs are put in place in a harmonized fashion, minimum standards must exist for health care environments across the country through appropriate legislative changes.
Further, security must be part of the circle of care and viewed as an integral part of the care team. The CFNU is advocating for a revision to the Criminal Code through Bill C-434 as a tool to deter violence against health care workers. The bill amends the Criminal Code to require courts to consider assaults on health care workers as aggravating circumstances for the purposes of sentencing. A similar provision already exists for police officers and transit workers. We commend MP Don Davies for introducing this bill and urge this committee to recommend that Parliament adopt Bill C-434. The CFNU is calling on the federal government to enforce the Westray law, which holds employers criminally responsible for negligence causing physical injury to workers.
Currently, standardized national statistics on workplace violence do not exist. The Canadian lnstitute for Health Information, CIHI, which collects and reports facility-level data, needs to publicly report data on facility-level violence in the workplace.
ln closing, Canada's nurses are appealing to members of this committee to amplify your voice in the committee's report to the federal government. We are calling for a comprehensive federal study on health human resources planning; targeted federal funding to enhance protections for health care workers through violence-prevention infrastructure and programs, with community police included as an essential partner within joint health and safety committees; the adoption by the federal government of best practices around violence prevention in federally regulated health care settings; the legislating of minimum national standards for security training in health care environments; support from this committee for Bill C-434 and the promotion and use of the Westray law by Crown prosecutors in cases involving health care workers; and federal funding toward CIHl's collecting and reporting of data on facility-level violence in the workplace.
Thank you.