Safety

Danger can follow victims into the ER

Hospital Safety Insider, July 3, 2014

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Patient violence is always a danger to healthcare workers, and in the emergency department workers can unknowingly be dealing with dangerous criminals, as discussed in a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

 

The paper’s report follows what happened in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny General Hospital’s ER on April 9 after a man was brought in for injuries he suffered in an assault. A curious security officer decided to check the man’s name against the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database and it turned out he was wanted in Alabama for capital murder. The man, 19-year-old Andre Dunlap had been charged for allegedly killing a 22-year-old man during a drug robbery last December in Birmingham.

Although the man was taken into custody by police without incident, hospital officials and healthcare security experts in the article say the incident was just one example of the way healthcare workers are put into harm’s way every day. Security policies were recently changed at several Pittsburgh-area hospitals, and include searching the belongings of patients brought in by gurney and using metal detectors for ER patients and visitors, the report added.

 

 



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