WA must take responsibility for nurses’ safety

Media coverage of nurses hurt in violent episodes at Seattle Children’s hospital has primarily focused on the hospital. This reporting is shortsighted and deflects our responsibility as citizens. Nurses were seriously harmed because of Washingtonian’s ignorance, apathy, or complacence.

Not only is the Children’s behavioral unit inadequately staffed to handle patients, but several patients should have never been admitted in the first place. Unfortunately, there were no other options. In the emergency room culture, we call this “dumping.”

There are not enough inpatient units in the state to handle violent children. Some waiting lists are over six months long and few can afford the nearly $2,000 per day that private programs charge. This is not fair to the institution, nurses, families, or our community.

Patients on the Children’s pediatric behavioral health unit have been destroying property, assaulting security guards and scaring staff (some patients are over 200 pounds.) What triggers such violence in adolescents? One example is video-gaming addiction withdrawal, especially in some children with autism. Their still-forming adolescent brains are craving, firing and confused. Cases of patients setting their house on fire or threatening parents with knives were all triggered by gaming restrictions. Yet digital media companies ignore the detrimental consequences of their creations, oblivious to their responsibility to address side effects while raking in lucrative profits.  

In the current disease care system, hospitals profit from disease and frankly, mental health is labor-intensive — not nearly as lucrative as cancer or heart disease. The result is inadequate care due to limited resources. Mental illness isn’t profitable. And the hospital was never designed to hold these patients long-term, but rather was set up for shorter stays. Nurse practitioners, therapists and residents rotate frequently through the unit (despite the fact that a trusted long-term relationship is known best practice to achieve significant therapeutic gains). 

Five years ago Gov. Jay Inslee called for mental health reform and now 22 counties are suing because so many citizens have been harmed by inadequate care resulting from our legislative laziness.

Our state will only be as healthy as our children. Our health care system will only work if nurses are safe. Call your representatives and demand emergency legislation for additional therapeutic centers and mental health. Allocate special funding to hospitals for more comprehensive therapeutic programs and for holding this special population in the meantime. Given the resources, nurses know precisely what is needed to heal their patients and keep themselves safe.

Instead of the 1:400 or greater counselor-to-student ratio in many of our schools, ensure that there is a mental health counselor for every 200 students so that we can identify problems early. Insist that school nurse funding comes from the health budget, and not the education budget. Provide proactive programs to parents and students on digital media addiction.

Establish a position of Youth Adviser to the Governor. This person would summarize and publicize reasons for pediatric hospitalizations and school mental health statistics in a quarterly health report — or maybe you would rather not know. Because that’s where we are now.  

With education, compassion, and advocacy, we can solve this crisis.