Warning: violence is rising in US hospitals

Assaults, rapes and murders are a growing danger for healthcare workers.

The shooting of a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore last Tuesday, which left him seriously wounded, is the latest example of rising violence in healthcare facilities, experts say. A warning issued in June by the Joint Commission, which accredits US hospitals, said: "Once considered a safe haven, healthcare institutions today are confronting steadily increasing rates of crime, including violent crime."

In a survey of 100 emergency doctors, 59% believed violence in hospitals is rising, while 41% said the shooting was an isolated case.

Since 2004 the Joint Commission has recorded a rise in assaults, rapes and murders, peaking in the last three years: 36 cases in 2007, 41 in 2008 and 33 in 2009. It has recorded 256 assaults in hospitals since 1995, more than 110 of them since 2007. The real number is thought to be much higher, as many cases are never reported.

The Commission warned that violence is committed by staff, visitors, patients and strangers. On Tuesday, an armed man of 50 who had brought his mother to the hospital, and who was upset that she had been left paralysed after a procedure, shot a doctor. After a stand-off with police, he killed his mother and then himself.

The most important way to stop violence, the Commission says, is to control who enters healthcare facilities, starting with staff checking everyone who comes with a patient instead of assuming they are family or friends.

Violence in US hospitals

2008: a man kills 3 people at a hospital in Columbus, blaming it for his mother's death.
2003: a doctor is wounded by a patient at a hospital near Los Angeles; the patient later kills himself.
1996: two people killed and three wounded in a shooting in a hospital emergency room in Richmond; the shooter was the ex-wife of one of the victims.
1993: three emergency doctors wounded and two women taken hostage at a medical centre in Los Angeles.
1991: a nurse killed and people taken hostage at a maternity and family-planning clinic in Utah by a man taking revenge for his wife's sterilisation.
1989: a doctor raped and strangled by a homeless man in New York.