Staff at Powell Valley Healthcare are working to improve the safety of employees, patients and visitors through focusing more on workplace violence in an industry much more susceptible to it than average.

At a recent board of directors meeting, staff updated board members on their work to put new programs in place to increase the safety of hospital staff, who are statistically at a greater risk for workplace violence than most other industries, noted Chief Nursing Officer Arlene Campeau.

“You’ve got a health care industry issue that's already manifesting itself,” she said. “Twenty five percent of all workplace violence is in a health care institution, so it’s very prevalent.”

Workplace violence includes any violence people may experience while working, and staff brought up a couple of past incidents at Powell involving a patient attacking an employee.

June Minchow, ER director, said there were three instances last year at the hospital of employees injured helping patients, and she related her own experience of getting bitten in the arm.

Nichole Gutierrez, inpatient services nursing director, noted that in the two most recent instances of an employee being assaulted by a patient, charges were filed and dropped.

“We need to be doing something more for workplace violence,” Minchow said, noting that law enforcement urged her to file after her incident, but charges were still soon dropped.

“One of the best practices is doing a worksite analysis,” she added. “Powell PD has a trained person to do this assessment. The nice thing is we've partnered with city police on this. The big thing is training and education.”

“Two staff have been sent to Billings Clinic for deescalation training and the Long-Term Care Center has trained five people,” Minchow said.

The group is also working to train everyone in the organization with some sort of training program.

“Between ALICE [active shooter response training] and Aegis [crisis prevention and deescalation] we have great tools and we have to keep training our staff,” Campeau said. “Our intent is to have everyone trained in the organization … and then yearly training, ongoing training is important.”