Terrified patients and staff had to be evacuated from the emergency department of one of Melbourne’s busiest hospitals on Wednesday night because of a violent patient.
Nobody was injured in the incident at Casey Hospital, in the city’s south-east, but the area was locked down for almost an hour until police and security staff brought the man under control.
“A number of staff were forced to lock themselves in rooms for protection,” said the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation’s Victorian branch secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick.
She said police had escorted the man, who had been sedated and restrained, to the hospital’s emergency department for assessment.
Monash Health spokesman Shane Butler said the restraints were later removed in line with the hospital’s policy, but when the man regained consciousness at about 9pm on Wednesday he became violent.
Ms Fitzpatrick said the man was aggressive towards staff and smashed several double-plate safety windows with an oxygen cylinder.
It follows two cases in recent months in which nurses at the Monash Medical Centre were attacked and left unconscious. Ms Fitzpatrick said a mental health nurse at the Monash had some of her teeth knocked out by a patient known to have issues with women, while a graduate nurse was strangled by a mental health patient.
Mr Butler said Casey Hospital emergency department staff and hospital security worked quickly to evacuate the area, with police called in to help control the situation.
He said the incident was rated as a code black by the hospital, which triggers the most serious response to violence.
“Thankfully no one was injured,” he said. “We are proud of the manner in which our clinical and security staff responded to the incident.”
It comes as an Auditor-General’s report published last week found hospital staff faced unacceptable risks of violence at the hands of patients and family members.
The report found doctors and nurses were reluctant to report violent incidents and recommended that hospitals worked on ways of preventing attacks on staff.
Some hospitals had improved security in emergency departments by separating potentially violent patients and installing CCTV cameras, the report found, but one in eight health services had not audited their layouts to prevent attacks.
The report included one example of a hospital where attempts to create a separate treatment room for volatile patients had stalled because of “resource limitations” so the patients had to be restrained on a trolley or cubicle close to the centre of the emergency department, a situation which posed a “significant risk”.
Health Minister Jill Hennessy said $20 million had been allocated in the state budget towards a violence prevention fund to make hospitals safer.
“Our hardworking nurses and doctors and their colleagues take care of us when we are at our most vulnerable,” she said. “They do not deserve to be the target of someone’s frustrations or aggression.”
Casey Hospital is in one of the state’s fastest growing areas and received $106 million in funding for an expansion to treat more patients in this year’s state budget.
Ms Fitzpatrick said the man had been taken to the emergency department because of a shortage of acute mental health beds.
She urged the state government to adopt the ANMF’s plan to tackle violence and aggression in hospitals.