Most health districts saw increases in assaults on staff over the last two years. Photo: RNZ / Vinay Ranchhod
Hundreds more health workers were assaulted at work last year, according to Health New Zealand data - with Auckland central and Waikato seeing the biggest spikes.
Nationally, about 14,000 assaults on staff by patients, family members and visitors, were recorded in the two-year period between January 2023 and December 2024.
The number of assaults increased by 30 percent between the first half of 2023 and the second half of 2024.
Fifteen out of 19 health districts saw increases in assaults on staff over the period.
Auckland central (covering Auckland City Hospital, Starship Children's Hospital and Greenlane Clinical Centre) saw the number of attacks double over the period, and accounted for 57 percent of the national increase.
The district recorded more than 1100 assaults on staff in the second half of 2024.
Meanwhile, the Waikato district also saw a significant increase of 59 percent in the number of assaults over the period.
An Auckland nurse, speaking in her capacity as a delegate for the NZ Nurses Organisation (NZNO), said staff are being abused every day.
"We've been physically attacked, things being thrown at us like chairs or urine bottles, whatever they can really reach they do tend to throw at us when they get frustrated ... and we've been punched. I have physically been punched and I've been thrown with a chair," she said.
The nurse, who did not want to be named, said staff have had to deal with dangerous situations themselves due to delays in security or police arriving.
"We've had incidents where we've had patients come up with weapons on our ward and we've had to remove those weapons, and having to remove those weapons also causes conflict and some endangerment of your own safety," she said.
She said while they were told to call the police when being threatened, the police had at times questioned why they needed to attend when the hospital had its own security.
Staff were concerned about the police's further planned withdrawals from mental health incidents, she said.
The nurse said she did not see any effects from filing incident reports as they were not followed up on by management.
"I think they don't want to face up to the reality of what's happening and just kind of want to sweep it under the rug - it's not happening and not facing it - because there's just no budget as such to deal with the situation," she said.
In an official information act response to RNZ, HNZ said patients' behaviour can be unpredictable, due to sometimes being cognitively impacted by some form of substance or alcohol abuse, or coping with the initial impact of an acute injury.
It said "we cannot prevent all these issues from occurring, but have robust processes in place to manage them".
The Public Service Association's national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said hospitals' management have normalised violence to staff in their attitude towards it.
"Claims that they can't prevent violence and assaults are wrong, every health worker deserves better from their employer than this normalising and minimising of violence and assaults.
"The employer here is not only normalising and accepting violence against health workers, but we are concerned there are failures to properly investigate incident reports.
"And we've even had reports of the employer scolding members for using agreed emergency protocols and pressure to downplay the severity of incidents, this is unacceptable," she said.
Public Service Association national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said hospitals' management have normalised violence to staff - a claim Health NZ denies. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Fitzsimons said the escalating levels of violence towards staff is a combination of failure to fill vacancies, rosters not being fully staffed and an increased use of methamphetamine.
The chairperson of the New Zealand faculty of the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine, Kate Allan, said the reported numbers of assaults could be barely touching the tip of the scale of what's happening in reality.
Allan, who also works as a senior emergency doctor in Auckland, said overcrowding in emergency departments and long wait periods are exacerbating what is already a very high intensity environment.
She said it's unacceptable that vulnerable patients are also being exposed to the violence.
"It's very scary for the patients that are in there, we've got a lot of elderly patients and we have children in our departments, so there's a lot of vulnerable people in the emergency department that are also impacted" she said.
Allan said there needs to be ongoing investment into the underlying causes of increasing assaults in hospitals.
"Minimising those long waits to care, ensuring that the patients have flow through the EDs and they're not waiting long times to be seen, also helping with community care and ensuring people who potentially don't need to be in hospital for mental health distress are able to be seen in the community rather than coming to the department to be seen there," she said.
HNZ has 'clear escalation pathway' for reporting assault, abuse
HNZ's interim chief human resource officer Fiona McCarthy said the agency rejected any inference that it normalised violence towards health workers.
"We have clear escalation pathway for any concerns raised, and we work with our teams and unions to ensure concerns are escalated appropriately through the local, regional or the national level," she said.
McCarthy said the main contributor to the increase in recorded assaults in 2024 is "improved reporting across the country and better engagement with staff".
"We have worked hard recently to encourage staff to report incidents of assault or abuse. Encouraging this reporting will help us to hear incidents, apply appropriate controls, support our staff and build a culture of safety," she said.
McCarthy said an "intensive violence reduction training" is being rolled out to security and clinical staff, as part of the government's $31 million funding over four years to improve safety.
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