Every day at St. Joe’s, there are five new workplace safety incident reports submitted by healthcare workers who have been subjected to unacceptable behaviour while doing their jobs. Incident reports include racism, assault, sexual touching and other forms of abuse.

This challenge is not unique to St. Joe’s. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is estimated that between eight per cent and 38 per cent of healthcare workers suffer physical violence at a certain point in their careers.

At St. Joe’s, violence will not be ignored.

St. Joe’s has created a multi-disciplinary working group to address workplace violence, which includes hospital leadership, subject matter experts, a patient and family advisor and frontline staff.

This summer, the group will oversee the launch of a new poster and campaign designed to bring attention to the issue of healthcare worker violence and the need to do more to prevent it. The campaign will include signage across the hospital and first-hand accounts from our healthcare workers about their experiences with workplace violence, to ensure our teams, patients, visitors and everyone in our community knows that at St. Joe’s, violence will not be ignored.

The working group is also embarking on a review of practices to ensure that we are using evidence-based best practices and doing everything we can to prevent violence in the workplace. As part of this effort, St. Joe’s will work with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to assess and make recommendations on St. Joe’s workplace safety systems and practices and organizational culture.

St. Joe’s has already started making some important changes to improve workplace safety, including the introduction of additional security personnel, security cameras, panic alarms and enhanced safety training.

St. Joe’s sees hundreds of thousands of patients each year and the vast majority treat healthcare workers with dignity and respect. But every incident of violence is one too many and St. Joe’s is committed to doing more to address it.