Voices in Healthcare

A popular TV show - Grey's Anatomy - recently aired its season finale, and while the critics may have called it "edge-of-your-seat" drama, for many in the hospital community it was, literally, sickening. The episode showed a man with a handgun in a hospital systematically killing physicians and staff.

In a different forum, at a different time, I could talk about gun ownership, violence on TV, its influence on children and more - but I want to note here that the fiction that was aired on Thursday night made caregivers queasy because violence is a threat that our hospital personnel work under every day.

We know that in Boston, at hospitals, gang members have run into emergency rooms with automatic weapons looking to finish off someone they'd previously shot.  We know that a hospital's ER - open to everyone at every hour of the day - admits patients that are drug addled, unstable, and/or armed. Security personnel have become, unfortunately, as integral a part of a hospital's staff as a radiologist or RN.

So when a hospital CEO e-mailed me after Thursday's show saying he was perturbed by the violence and the copycat crazies it could spur, I saw his point.

As part of MHA's legislative package this year, we made it a priority to pass legislation (sponsored by Sen. Anthony Petrucelli) that  imposes heightened penalties for assaults committed on healthcare providers in the line of duty.  Both the House and Senate have approved versions of this language. The bill won't end violence, but it may help curb it. I hope so.

And I hope that when we talk about hospitals - about healthcare costs, and quality of care, about payment reform, and the like - that we never lose sight of the fact that hospitals are extraordinarily complex places that are woven into the fabric of a community - both the good and bad parts of it. Our caregivers are courageous, not only protecting the health and welfare of citizens but doing it within a stressful, and potentially dangerous, environment. Life-saving care under life-threatening circumstances is something for "stakeholders" to think about before they lob the next verbal bomb against hospitals.