Gun incident at Minnesota hospital raises questions about nurse safety

The man who sparked a lockdown at the M Health Fairview Southdale hospital earlier this week made his first appearance in court today. Larry Sharp faces charges after he allegedly pointed a gun at his sister while both were at the hospital visiting their mother. Police say the siblings were arguing over power of attorney for their mom when a hospital worker heard someone calling for help and saw the gun.

No one was hurt, and the hospital said it had worked to secure the facility prior to the incident, investing in more secure entrances and weapons detection systems. That’s because health care workers routinely rank as among the most likely to experience threats or assaults on the job.

Rachel Andersen, a steward with the Minnesota Nurses Association and vice president of National Nurses United spoke to MPR News host Cathy Wurzer about nurse safety.

The transcript below has been edited lightly for length and clarity. To hear the conversation, click on the audio player above.

How dangerous are some situations that nurses find themselves in?

We’ve been talking about the increased violence that we experience for years, and it has only gotten worse since COVID. We have been saying that we don’t regulate our patients and we don’t regulate our visitors who come into our building, whereas other buildings are regulated.

I couldn't simply walk into my child’s school and do what had happened on Tuesday, but at a hospital, we have so many shortcomings in our safety and our security measures.

We only have the one metal detector that they just put in place a week before the incident you’re talking about, and we’ve been asking for it for years. So while this incident on Tuesday was especially eye-grabbing, we are at risk for violence every single day on the job.

This is at Fairview Southdale, the one metal detector?

Correct, the one metal detector exists at the emergency department, and then we have five other entrances that have visitors coming in and out of those every day that don’t have any metal detectors.

You mentioned COVID-19. Has this really been an issue since COVID? Or has it always been the case?

Violence against nurses has been the case since I started on my job. Day one as a new grad, I had a phone cord wrapped around my neck while I was pregnant. I’ve had walkers thrown at me. I’ve had everything from patients intentionally digging their nails into my skin to having urine thrown at me. So the violence that we experience every single day on the job – that's not going to go away with metal detectors. One of the battle cries that we have been sounding for years and years since I have been a nurse has been that the best way to improve and to mitigate violence on the health care staff is to increase staffing levels.

A lot of our patient behaviors happen because we're not able to recognize the warning signs of escalation in our patients who are maybe dysregulated for certain reasons, like their baseline conditions such as dementia or maybe bipolar. The only way to improve these things is to have those staffing levels where we can watch and monitor our patients and deescalate them before anything violent and aggressive happens.

I understand that some nurses are wearing silent alarms.

The silent alarms that you have heard about are somewhat like a walkie talkie system that attaches with a clip to our uniforms, and they only work if you're able to push our buttons five times in a certain sequence. So you have to be able to access this clip-on badge that you can press five different times in order to sound a silent distress alarm. But there are flaws with that system as well. A recent incident where we had a patient that intentionally strangled a nurse, she was not able to access her badge. There are times that the batteries die in them or that they are off network. So hearing that the badges are an option to us is not an acceptable answer.

We have brought the current system that we have to our administration’s attention, and they said that they, I’m using air quotes here, are looking into other alternatives.

Is the legislature looking at any increased staffing ratios, or is that a dead issue this session?

It's my understanding that it's a dead issue this session. I think both parties have to agree to hear the bill, and I don't believe that we're at that point. We had a hearing on March 27 about staffing, but I don't believe that this session, it's going to go any further. For years, as we've brought this forward and brought this forward, we've heard from the legislature, “Why can't you get this at the bargaining table?” And this year, as we're bargaining as we have in the past, we're going to bring our staffing forward. But every time we do, we're told from our employer that you need to bring this issue to the legislature, and when we do bring it to the legislature, our employer is in the room advocating against it.

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