Etienne Krug: We have a clear a plan for the decade. And it is really a plan that emphasizes
working in countries, with countries to strengthen road safety. We’ll work on five different pillars. We’ll work on the management of road safety making sure there is a lead agency, there is a data collection system, we will work on improving infrastructures, the roads, improving vehicle safety, changing people’s behaviour to make sure they don’t drink and drive, they put their seatbelts, they don’t speed and finally improve the trauma care, the post-crash response. It is a problem that can be tackled. We have cost-effective solutions.
Ban Ki-moon: This U.N. decade of action for road safety provides good policies. We have
good tools. We have also good knowledge. We have to build safer roads, and safer vehi- cles. Therefore, we need to have a concerted effort. If we live by example, we can save millions and millions of lives.
Michael Bloomberg: You know the “make roads safe” campaign was really the impetus
to get going the U.N. decade of action for road safety, and if in this decade we can focus on a few simple things… because there are solutions and they are measurable and imple- mentable.
Fred Wegman: I’m very much in favour of a system approach, and design the system in
such a way that the risk of serious injuries or of fatalities is very very low indeed. How to diminish kinetic energy in crashes and to reduce speed when you have a potential crash between a car and a, and a pedestrian so the system approach is applicable all over the world, not something for developed countries. You can apply everywhere…
Lord Robertson: It’s very important that we translate the awareness that we have now
created in this issue into some real and genuine action that involves every section of the community.
So we are hoping that this will bring in the private sector, it will bring in the corporate sec- tor, it will bring in philanthropic organizations who now know that there is an epidemy that it’s the biggest single killer of young people in the world today; and that there are ways on which it can be prevented, and that there are remedies: better roads, seatbelts, crash-hel- mets and action against speeding and against drinking. These are all areas in which we can
52
ENGLISH FOR HEALTH-CARE PROVIDERSUnit 10. ER Safety
Narrator: Every week in the United States between eight and thirty percent of emergency
department nurses are victims of physical violence, according to a new study released by the Emergency Nurses Association.
Elizabeth McCoy: It’s been kind scary. We have had nurses that were severely injured, from
violent acts towards them. It makes you feel frightened. It makes you scared to come into your job sometimes because you just don’t know if you’re going to get hurt like, you know, it’s not like a police officer. We wear a vest and you’re expecting something to happen. We don’t do that, we just want to get care, we’re not thinking about always protecting ourselves.
Narrator: Elizabeth McCoy is a nurse at the emergency room at Morristown Memorial for
close to fourteen years.
Elizabeth McCoy: There have been broken necks, there have been stabbings, there have
been some very acute injuries were our staff members weren’t able to come back to work.
Narrator: More than half the nurses surveyed by ENA reported experiencing physical or
verbal abuse at work in the last seven days. Emergency department violence survey study also found that fifty percent of the nurses who reported experiencing physical violence said they sustained a physical injury as a result of the incident in enormous half the cases no action was taken against the perpetrator.
Dr. Mary Kamienski: People suddenly come into the emergency department I’m an emer-
gency nurse…
Narrator: Dr. Mary Kamienski is currently serving as a member of the ENA Board of Direc-
tors.
Dr. Mary Kamienski: Emergency nurse violence is… it is such an issue that is a part of our
strategic plan of the National Emergency Nurses Association to make the workplace safe for emergency nurses and all the other personnel there.
And it isn’t just an issue for emergency nurses or health-care personnel that are working in the department, because every patient in that department, if there is violence going on in there, they are also a risk.
There’s a lot of strategies that we teach nurses and we teach health-care personnel things such as if the person is drinking or under the influence, you don’t get cornered in the room with them. Those are just safety precautions.
Narrator: Having an enclosed nurses’ station, security sites and well-laid areas are associ-
ated with significantly lower verbal abuse rates.
Elizabeth McCoy: On all our nursing and emergency department, you can only have ac-
cess if you work here and have appropriate privileges to be in the emergency department, and this helps prevent on patients and people who should not be in here.
53
Teacher’s book
Narrator: Nurses working in emergency departments at hospitals with policies regarding
violence reported experiencing fewer incidents of physical or verbal violence.
Elizabeth McCoy: We’ve had our secretaries, our tax, our nurses trained, in several differ-
ent venues where the main one is the nurse safe training on that we have and it has been very very successful. Everyone’s been very happy with that, because it teaches us how to get out the whole how to get out restraints and you really don’t have to think about it. This patient, who has an altered mental status, and increased aggression, and I was go- ing to medicate her in order to calm her down and she grabbed my arm and in the nursing training they teach us how to grab out their hand and pull out so that I can pull out away, so I don’t hurt the patient but I’m able to get away.
The patient was trying to choke me. So one of the things we are taught to get away from the choke is to take our heel and slide it down vision of the leg. We are going the opposite direction of the nerve endings, so this elicits a lot of pain and should back away and let go. I approach the patient in the room, her mental status and her aggravation level has increased. She had clenched fists. She had her arms ready to hit me. The best thing to do is to get out of the situation. The patient feels cornered, and the patient doesn’t feel like she is in control anymore, so the best thing to do is always try to get out of the situation if you can.
Narrator: The emergency department violence surveillance study also found that patients
and their relatives were the perpetrators of the abuse in nearly all incidents of physical vio- lence. Additional information is available at ENA’s website, which is www.ena.org.
Dr. Mary Kamienski: A big goal is that it will be a felony offense in every emergency
department in the United States. It is in New Jersey it’s a felony offense if you physically abuse or assault an emergency nurse or health-care worker.
Note:
ENA: Emergency Nurses Association.