EP:5 We're Throwing the Bedpan at Workplace Violence

Can you imagine being physically assaulted at work? What if you were a nurse or medic whose day-to-day life has become a nightmare owing to the escalating workplace violence? Learn about the eye-opening statistics and narratives, like the chilling story of Captain John Arroyo who miraculously survived a shooting at his workplace. 

Did you know we are heading for a potential crisis in healthcare? Healthcare professionals are abandoning their careers due to fear of violence, assault and even death, a trend that is leading to potential hospital closures and a healthcare staff crisis. We are committed to raising awareness and propose a "call to action" to create awareness and instigate positive change. So, join us as we strive to make a difference in the lives of our brave healthcare workers and military personnel.

Nurses and Medics: This is your platform! We want to hear your stories of the good, the bad and the ugly. Send us an email at cominghomewell@gmail.com

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Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:20

It's Detox here. I'm here with my one and only co-host, my writer, die MZ, how are you Good? What's up guys. So here's the question of the day have you ever been in a fight or in a workplace environment?

Speaker 3: 0:38

So thankfully no, not directly. I have seen my fair share of workplace violence and we've all heard the stories through the years of what kind of awful things happen, not just in the military but in the healthcare setting too. I'm happy to say I've not had a direct hand in any of that, but unfortunately have had a front row seat to it.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Yeah, we've seen it in the news. Right, where did we see Fort Hood? There was the psychologist, psychiatrist, the sleeper-style guy right.

Speaker 2: 1:10

Yeah, that lost his cookies, yeah, and he went and shot up and then there was Wine Up and there was a base up in Washington state. This was a lot of years ago, it was probably maybe 20 years ago and then always I remember it, there guy walked into the hospital and started shooting things up, but one of my buddies that we flew with was actually there and dove underneath a stretcher and fortunately didn't get hit. So there was that and I've been in a couple scenarios. I had a.

Speaker 2: 1:47

Amazingly it wasn't a patient, it was actually a physician that lost his mind and he got in my face and they thought he was going to choke me out and they ran down and got the flight commander. And when they got the flight commander they said, hey, we think he's gonna like you need to come now. I think he's gonna get decked. And so she did and he didn't deck me. I was lucky. But he had an abusive pattern, like one time he ripped the call bell off the wall because it was ringing and it was driving him crazy. And when I became the nurse manager, I actually had to go down to the quality office and he had a massive file on all the stuff that he had done and amazingly still in the military I've known, because they apparently needed doctors really desperately at that time.

Speaker 3: 2:42

And the longer that's tolerated, the more and more he's gonna think that's okay, that is acceptable exactly.

Speaker 2: 2:47

So I was just curious, what if you had ever experienced it yourself?

Speaker 2: 2:53

And because I looked at the studies and I think you did some research too right A little bit yep, and we're seeing it on the rise, and COVID just absolutely escalated that, because we have now a nursing shortage, a healthcare shortage. It's not even just nursing, it's a healthcare shortage. So we're noticing that workplace violence across the board is on the rise, right, we're having lots of issues. I just saw a study, I think it, from between 2011 to 2018, it was up like this astronomical number, like 63%. That's before COVID and then it continued to go up during COVID. And then what did we run into on top of that? A shortage, right, because they were dying or they were leaving from burnout. So you looked at some stats. You actually have some real numbers in there. What?

Speaker 3: 3:48

are you? Yeah, yeah. So I had found one from June of this year, so very recent, and an astounding 62% of respondents to the survey that was done had indicated that they'd endured some kind of scratching, biting or hitting from combative patients, which, unfortunately, was not a huge surprise. It's a little more than half, and I think most healthcare workers that you talk to have some kind of story along those lines where they've been exposed to it or dealt with it themselves. Another 21% said that a patient had thrown something at them.

Speaker 3: 4:24

14% said that they had dealt with some kind of sexual assault or harassment, and this one kind of threw me for a loop. 1% said that they were actually shot by a combative patient that was using a firearm. I'm thinking, holy crap, how does that even happen? Maybe they're in the ER and they still have it on them. I don't know, but either way, I don't think nurses or really any healthcare professional goes into that job, that occupation, thinking, well, I'm going to get my ass whooped today. It's just not part of the deal up front, but it is very much a part of, unfortunately, the picture.

Speaker 2: 5:08

Well, the shooting part, when you said that 1% and how that happens. I'm taking a stab at this, but one your ER is frontline. If we were breaking down where the violence was happening, it would not be shocking to say a large percentage was in the ER. Right, that's your frontline.

Speaker 3: 5:25

ER ambulance services.

Speaker 2: 5:27

Yeah, urgent cares, any place that they're first walking in the door. I'm sure that that risk is higher. But what kind of popped in my head when you said that like how does somebody like you know that you're taking care of becomes combative and shoot you? There's a lot of drive by, dump them off, right, somebody, their buddy gets hurt. But maybe they were doing something that gang violence, gang violent that. So they are going to help their buddy and they're going to drive by and just throw them out the door and keep going. So if the guy's armed, he means high or anything's going on or is disoriented for any reason at all.

Speaker 3: 6:04

TBI, or even just pain makes people do weird things. Oh, absolutely. I think there's other environmental factors with that too. I mean, think about the long wait times that people have to deal with when they show up to the ER, or, you know, the lack of information given by staff. I know that can be incredibly frustrating. Or even just the differences in language or culture. You know you get some. I don't know. I don't want to start stereotyping too much, but you get somebody that doesn't necessarily appreciate the healthcare worker that comes from another country. They can't understand them. They're just trying to get to the bottom of whatever is going on with their loved one and it gets super frustrating. I think that can kind of be, you know, the building blocks, the catalyst of where some of that violence might come in, from a patient to healthcare employee standpoint.

Speaker 2: 6:54

Oh God, yeah. And then again add on to it that COVID hit and in the beginning there was a lot of healthcare workers that were not surviving because they didn't know what this was, how to handle it. And then a lot of people don't realize, like in the, there were actually medical people that were getting furloughed during COVID because the people that they needed were specialized. They needed people that knew how to run ventilators. So those RTs, you know, like Leslie, were on the front lines. Any ICU nurse, anybody that knew how to run a ventilator, was the hot commodity right Trauma nurses, icu nurses, who knows, maybe some of the ER nurses had that background.

Speaker 2: 7:40

Rts were on the front line, but if you took a postpartum nurse, she's not going to be needed. If they actually diverted their OB to another place and became a COVID unit, then that nurse is not needed there at that time if they don't have any background. So, yes, nurses were needed, and then there were fewer of them that they could utilize to the full capacity, so now there's less of them running a bigger ship, right, and so now there is more burnout. And so you see where it just kind of like proliferates. Like I wonder out of curiosity, because, like I told you at the beginning, I had a doctor in my face. I couldn't find any research. I'm sure if I did more I would have found something.

Speaker 2: 8:30

But the peer on peer violence did something like that escalate during COVID? I would think it would be safe to say that it would, as people were tired and we say violence. Maybe I'm being a little too specific, but any abuse against a person, verbal abuse, just blowing up at people, blowing, hazing, yeah, people are burnt out and they don't have any tools in the toolbox anymore and they don't have any more coping mechanisms, and so you just have to wonder if that was occurring and people were dealing with that on top of you know, maybe patients. And I have to say, when we're talking about workplace violence, what I didn't see in the breakdown which I'm sure it might have been there somewhere was I've been in scenarios where, like I, got kicked in the face one time by a patient that got very agitated when we had, when the nurse had to give IV medications.

Speaker 2: 9:37

Now she already had an IV in place, but it was something about the nurse, you know, holding her hand and she wasn't like roughing anything, she was just securing the hand to give the IV and the woman would just like get very combative and she's very disoriented because she had a sub-dermal hematoma and so she was already very disoriented. So they said, hey, can you come in and put your hands on her feet just to keep her down so she doesn't twist and turn? And I said, sure, and just as I was getting my hands down, her foot came up and then clocked me right in the face. It wasn't intentional, you know. The person was disoriented, much like people that get sundowners or people with Alzheimer's that are disoriented.

Speaker 2: 10:24

Anybody that's disoriented for any reason. Drugs, tbi, yeah, yeah, and so you could end up a victim or survivor is a better term for it.

Speaker 3: 10:34

It's workplace violence, but yeah, there's different flavors, for sure. There's the unintentional ones, like that Patient to professional, there's peer to peer, there's the totally random, you know shooting like the active shooter scenarios. It comes in all different types.

Speaker 2: 10:55

But our responses still become very similar. If I know that I'm going to go work on a unit that has a lot of disoriented patients and they could respond any way, you're going to be more cautious, you're going to be a little more protective, you know, and make sure you're taking the right precautions. So it's still trauma to the mind, you know, and it's still hard on us as it builds over the years, if you do that for years and years and years.

Speaker 3: 11:30

But you're not going to walk into the knee, you think, and you're going to get your ass whooped by your patient like you would. Maybe an EMS or in, yeah, in the ER you're going to be looking over your shoulder and who's in the room with me? What? What medications are they on? Why are they here? What? You're going to be thinking about a lot of things just based off of where you're at.

Speaker 2: 11:49

Even a friend of mine is an ambulance. He was a paramedic and he worked up in St Louis and he was telling me, if we came up on a scene and we got called to a scene because there was a shooting or somebody was in the alley, he goes and there was no police presence. Seeing that, safe, we are not walking in there. We're not going to be a hero because we're probably not going to come out either. We're going to sit back. You know, I mean now those guys are kind of expecting it a little bit more because they're out in the field and they know the areas and they know the risky places and whatnot. But coming into your own environment, in a hospital or in an urgent care clinic, they just sent it somebody from a shooting back in March and they walked in and they shot four people.

Speaker 2: 12:45

And this was unfortunate, because this is the exception, not the rule. It was a veteran and I say that because People assume, oh, a veteran has PTSD, then you have to be careful, they're gonna like lose their mind. No, no, not always the case. The majority of the people do very well, but there is a population, like anybody, that if it's too severe and they didn't get the right intervention or didn't get intervention, then they become a higher risk, just like anybody that has severe mental health conditions. If you think the military away from that and you just said this is a person with severe PTSD from trauma, maybe massive childhood trauma or whatever the same scenario could happen. Right, it's all about them getting the help. Did they get the help or they you know? So that was an unfortunate situation, but I just saw that where he just got indicted on four counts.

Speaker 3: 13:52

Man. We could go into a whole rabbit hole with what led up to that point, and maybe we can save that for another day, because, as you're explaining that scenario, I have questions about reaching out for help, and how many times. What kind of resources were there? What did the wait time look like? So I'll save that for another time. But another scenario that pops up in my head was First Lieutenant Katie Blanchard, who was an Army nurse working on Fort Leavenworth in Kentucky. She was at work one day and a coworker ended up. I don't know what all had happened leading up to that, but they had some kind of confrontation, there was some conflict there and a coworker ended up dumping gasoline on her, lit her on fire and obviously that In the hospital yeah, in the hospital they were at work.

Speaker 3: 14:48

Out of the corner of her eye she saw some kind of like brown liquid. It was the gasoline Co-worker ended up literally dumping it on her, lit her on fire and I mean it changed everything. Like was this?

Speaker 2: 15:03

a former coworker or a former coworker?

Speaker 3: 15:07

No, I think they were working the floor together that day and he ended up lighting her on fire and, of course, had to be transported. They took her to San Antonio Hospital from Kentucky and her rehab on the burn unit took long, long time. She wasn't able to nurse on the floor anymore. She was a mom three kids like in the hospital for a long, long time and, from what I understand just reading online and hearing other interviews that were done while she was at that San Antonio Hospital she met another Army captain. He wasn't a nurse, he was actually a Green Beret. His name was Captain John Arroyo. He's a Green Beret and I think it was about two years prior to Lieutenant Blanchard's unfortunate situation.

Speaker 3: 15:57

He was shot at close range, also by a coworker. He had just pulled up to work that day and there was a specialist. His name was Ivan Lopez. For whatever reason, he got it in his head that he was gonna come to work and kill people that day and, yeah, he, at very close range, shot Captain Arroyo right in the throat. The fact that he survived is just absolutely unreal. Oh God, yeah, with the location of the GSW, that's unreal. He did it with a 45 caliber pistol, by the way. So he came to do some damage and that's yeah, it's exactly what he did. After he shot Captain Arroyo, he ended up going into the shop, shot and killed another three people and, I believe, wounded 15 others. So this whole workplace violence thing it's not a one-off, it's not a and that only happens in movies or that doesn't really happen. No, it's very real. There's names, faces, and this is all relatively recent stuff.

Speaker 2: 17:06

Yeah, actually I was reading this article here, I'm gonna pull it up and actually they were talking about they think that the numbers have risen to 75% of workplace assault occurring in healthcare workplace Again confirming healthcare is the most unsafe job type in this country, even more than the police or military. That is wild.

Speaker 2: 17:33

So that's what Absolutely wild Military and medical together and I'm like, oh snap, what does that look like? Like I couldn't find any research. I would have to dig pretty hard but nothing was popping up as I looked through stuff. But now here's the other problem they're already burnt out. People are tired. Covid just did a number on us and again, this was on kevinmdcom and I just happened to pull it up and I was reading through it and it's all linked. I mean, all his information is linked. But he said healthcare workers are now fleeing the violent, toxic workplace. 20% of the US healthcare workers so that's four to five million workers healthcare workers have left healthcare over the last two years because they don't tired.

Speaker 3: 18:25

Yeah, they're tired of the BS.

Speaker 2: 18:27

This isn't what they came to do, yeah and people are now and they said the exodus continues and the main reason is dangers of abuse, assault and death. Among the predominant motivations the risk of dying just because you show up for work Like you said. You don't think you're going to go to work to take care of people to make them better and end up next to them or worse. So people are like, yeah, that just doesn't sound so great. Now more and more doctors, nurses, rts, all of them, radiologists, all of them that their families are now starting to fear them going to work. Now COVID's ripped through. We have less staff just by attrition, and some of it was staff they burned out. Now they're leaving.

Speaker 2: 19:23

On top of that, now you've got skeleton crews running hospitals and clinics and urgent cares and all that stuff and they're tired. Now you've got a whole medical community that has a certain expectation of healthcare like they should get it at a normal amount of time, and they're not. It's taking a month or two and we all know the more specialized you get, the longer it takes to get the appointments, because if you were specialists that there are Now, they're getting frustrated and tired and maybe even clinically worse because they can't get in there in a normal amount of time. So to me I just don't see where this is going to end anytime soon At least not well.

Speaker 3: 20:09

No, I've heard you say before Right now is not the time to get sick. No, there's too much strength on the system.

Speaker 2: 20:15

Exactly so. This guy went on to say hospital stability is also increasingly affected by the rising violence and increased work exodus. Right, they're showing that over. Get this number 630 US hospitals are at extreme risk of closure. So you just. I just feel like it's a hamster on a wheel. Hamster on a wheel, like there's one thing, is just making something else worse and this is impacting that and that is impacting this.

Speaker 3: 20:44

Well, it's all interconnected and when you're talking about all these people that left, they with suffrages people keep using quiet quitting.

Speaker 2: 20:52

Oh, yeah, that was that Turn their quiet quitting yeah.

Speaker 3: 20:55

It makes me wonder, like, out of that population of people, how many have dealt with workplace violence and didn't report it? How many people have been silently suffering just dealing with it, saying, well, you know, I've got bills to pay and this is a means to an end? Like, how many people didn't report and from there to why?

Speaker 2: 21:17

It just. It just kind of breaks my heart to see what's happening now and one of the again this article is just kind of really intriguing to me. And they were saying that with this risk of hospital closures, right, 630 US hospitals, that is a lot. One of the cheap reasons is because they have the inability to find enough doctors, nurses or any mid-level staff to be able to bring them in. And then the facilities now again it's the whole tumbling effect. Facilities can't get the staff, so what do they start doing? They have to start closing some of these services. And now they can't get essential services that they need. And guess what happens? There's no cash flow, and when there's no cash flow, there's no place to pay people and then there's no hospital. So I mean it just is starting to tumble and it's terrifying. I mean it really is terrifying to see what's happening.

Speaker 3: 22:15

So, in addition to that report that you read, we were able to find one that was specific to the DOD, that I believe was from 2021. And it was kind of talking about the different kinds of interpersonal violence. The military in general?

Speaker 3: 22:30

Yes, Specific to the military and touched on why people weren't reporting and who was, and broke it down even further by. Of those that reported what their demographics look like and I was kind of telling detox earlier Wasn't surprised to learn that a majority of them were male. The military, just by its nature, is majority male, so that didn't come as a surprise. A majority of the reports were enlisted Also not really surprising if you know anything about our culture. Not saying I agree or condone it, but just saying that that didn't come as a big shocker. A majority were white. But what was surprising to me was, of those that had reported, a majority of them were E5 to E9. So these are people towards the later end of their career. You know, typically an E9 has been in for 20 some years. They've got tenure. They've got a whole lot to lose. Why the hell are they getting wrapped up in this stuff?

Speaker 2: 23:32

Were they the ones being violent or the ones that were receiving? Were they the victims of violence?

Speaker 3: 23:39

From. If I read it correctly, they were instigating.

Speaker 2: 23:45

Yeah. So you know I have a lot of thoughts on that one. When you're looking at military culture and rank and now I'm going to preface it and say I knew a lot of good senior leaders I mean there are people that I would go to battle with in a heartbeat, but I also saw a very fair share of people trying to build little empires. Military is a great place for many, empire building. And when you're dealing with a rank structure but I think this is what we agreed on back when we talked with Leslie Yancy was that the biggest difference is that they could say In the civilian sector fuck you, pound sand, I quit, yeah, that thing. And we don't have that luxury. We have to do seven day off out. If we take off and we're not where we're supposed to be, we're now a wall, I mean you don't get to quit and there's no pink.

Speaker 2: 24:45

So I don't care what anybody says. If you're like, why didn't they say something? I'm like because they're a senior airman or they're a private, they're a junior ranking enlisted person, like they are, like the old fashioned, like raising your kids, they should be seen and not heard, Right, and it is very easy to suppress them and try to shut them up.

Speaker 3: 25:08

That's one that has a lot to do with the barriers to reporting, just the rank structure in itself, and I think a lot of probably fear fear of embarrassment, fear of not being believed, fear of repercussions If I speak up and maybe there's going to be some kind of retribution. There's a whole lot of reasons why.

Speaker 2: 25:31

Well, it's a psychology because we are taught what we are a team. We're a team and suck it up.

Speaker 2: 25:37

Suck it up because we are part of a whole and we don't have any individuality in that. The success of the team is to be the success of everybody. Everybody's success is the success of the team, right? So when somebody steps up and says, hey, this isn't right, that hurt me. There's no me in this. Right, it's a team. So it's a struggle to come out forward and say, hey, we have a problem here. And then it's going to be like who are you going to believe? And really hard for Aaron Snuffy to say that chief or that senior or that whatever Did something violent against me or assaulted me or whatever. And maybe that person on the front side Was like everybody's friend Nobody could believe that he could do that or she could do that or whatever. You know what I mean. Yeah, when you get into the he said, she said stuff and you're dealing with rank, the low person on the totem pole often is the one that yeah, they're gonna shy away from it.

Speaker 3: 26:42

You lump in, you know, distrust in their chain of command or a lack of Confidence in the due process that should be happening.

Speaker 2: 26:50

It's no wonder that people are staying quiet about it so I have something that I thought was kind of jaw-dropping. So After 9-11 and COVID and I'm putting out these two big events and Flight attendants were really Getting beat up, probably literally in some senses, and and I'm bringing this up with a purpose here and so what happened? They have air marshals. If a flight attendant or any flight staff member says you're out, there is no question they are out. They will get TSA in there or the police, the airport police, and they will remove them. They, they can do that right. They have as much Security as they can, because these guys were really having problems with belligerent people.

Speaker 2: 27:49

The point I was making to this is that you know, they have all this Support for the airlines and then they give them that empowerment and there's all kinds of rules have been put in place and all this stuff right, and I'm sure it's not perfect, but I'm just saying that things have been done right so far. They have a various healthcare, workplace violence bills have appeared in front of Congress over the past several years, but they have failed to win enough support to be acted upon. And, and they said one of the reasons that they felt that this Was the cause why there was not enough action was because they think that there might not be enough public awareness.

Speaker 3: 28:33

Well, guess, what we're doing today talks public service announcement. Don't be a douchebag. Yeah, seriously it's. And if maybe you're listening to this, you manage an office or a leader of any type, god, even if you're not. I don't care if you're low man on the totem pole. There's things you can do without pushing policies and being a politician. That'll help your work. Section kind of Combat, what's going on? I don't care if you're a military, civilian, whatever setting you happen to work in, just Creating space for anybody that has experienced it, you know, creating a culture of accountability. So if you see something, say something, and if you're in a power of authority to do something about it, you damn well should I.

Speaker 2: 29:20

Think we need a call to action. That's what we need to do.

Speaker 3: 29:23

Are we throwing up the bat signal?

Speaker 2: 29:25

We're throwing up the bullets to bedpan some else. Ours is, instead of a bat sign, it's a bedpan with bullet holes in it. I can dig it. I can dig it. So this is the call to action. If you have experienced or you have witnessed somebody, but in bed, in a situation where you've witnessed workplace violence, email us coming home, well, as our parent podcast and they are so kind to sponsor us and and give us this platform and you can say, hey, this happened to us and we want to hear from you guys. I think, if enough people Write in and say, yeah, this crap happened to me and we start putting this on the podcast, maybe we will make more awareness influence positive change.

Speaker 3: 30:14

That's it. Are we influencers? Podcasts maybe, I don't know. Content creating Contact.

Speaker 2: 30:23

I don't know.

Speaker 2: 30:24

I think it's therapeutic and it is therapeutic, because now I think back and I'm like, oh yeah, that happened. Oh yeah, and see, and did I ever say anything? No, as a matter of fact, when the doctor got in my face and I thought he was gonna choke me out too, to be honest, I stood my ground. I met him at a girl. I I I have no doubt that might have been a little pee running down my leg, but I was like I was not gonna back off and when it was done, I was like, all right, mama didn't raise no bitch and I she can be, but not that day, and so I, you know, I held that ground and I was like yeah, but does it Impact me?

Speaker 2: 31:03

Yeah, you're thinking about it years later, because every time this guy came around I was assessing him. I had him down to a science. I knew his patterns. I knew that every three weeks is about when he would blow up again. So here I am breaking down him Right to know when I think he's gonna blow up. That that is a little bit of trauma, you think.

Speaker 3: 31:24

Did you have, just out of curiosity, did you have leadership that was approachable and invested enough in you to To let you knock on their door and say, hey, this happened and them take care of it?

Speaker 2: 31:36

at that assignment at that exact moment. No because the flight commander and the chief nurse were both douchebags, but when they changed out it was probably the best leadership and the best mentors I had, and if that same incident had happened, like later when the new leadership was in, I would have no problems. As a matter of fact, we did have another doctor and he was verbally Abusive to the staff to the point where our staff Would ask me to go work.

Speaker 2: 32:11

Labor and delivery didn't have to because we worked on postpartum and labor and labor and delivery and all of it. And so they'd be like, can you work over there? Dr Sorenson was working today and these people loved labor and delivery, they loved working over there, and I'm all like, okay, and so I would go over, and he did not like me. But he, he really hit the peak when I got a phone call two in the morning Because, had they had a delivery, they were trying to do their paperwork. He had left and he didn't write down all the info that they needed to close out the paperwork. So they said, hey, can you page him? He just left to go home. Can you page him and get you know estimated blood loss and stuff like that? They called you a twit fuck. No, no, no, not for that. They called him. Oh, okay, right.

Speaker 2: 32:57

What happened next? The tech made the phone call and I put a page into him and he called back and the tech happened to pick the phone up and the first words out of his mouth Were this better be fucking good. That was his first comment. Then I got the phone call. Then I got a phone call too in the morning, going ma'am we have a problem like they had finally had it, and so that resulted in me going to the chief Doc and nurse and saying if Something is not done, come get your boy. I am gonna hold him on UCM day charges, and for the civilian world, that's like our legal, you know route that uniformed code of military justice and so he, and that that one incident Was the cherry behind a hundred other of them.

Speaker 2: 33:46

I mean he was verbally abusive to people Into his patience. I watched him walk in a room, oh, and I no joke. The woman had been labor and she wasn't progressing. He walked in at like I don't know six, seven in the morning, grabbed a glove, put it on, did not say hello to anybody husband, wife, me.

Speaker 3: 34:07

Nobody Picks the sheet up and checks her that's sexual assault, brother, I don't care if you're a doc.

Speaker 2: 34:13

I thought the husband was gonna come up over the bed and he walked out and like you need to see section. The problem I was in was that that baby was starting to get into stress and needed the C-section and I was a diesel and, yeah, he was having problems and we had to get the baby out, and so it was a Nightmare, absolute nightmare, that's not even just like poor Healthcare.

Speaker 2: 34:38

That's just being a human two incidences and I could list out a ton more and that behavior Was tolerated for a long time by the staff there until they were like we can't do this anymore. We, we cannot, we don't, we're afraid to work with him. It was really, really bad. You know, now that we talk about it, I'm like, oh yeah, all these thoughts come up. I'm like there was a lot that happened, you know, and then you, we have that, that's, that's like day to day stuff. We ourselves, as military Medical, have deployment where we are expecting and we are constantly under the threat of getting bombed or Shot or anything, depending on what you're doing. I stress so we, we are already. That is where we expected, not in Garrison. Now back home, not back home. That is supposed to be a safe place. But yet here we are right dealing with things like this and it is prevalent Everywhere.

Speaker 2: 35:45

Yeah, so we want to hear from you guys. Honestly, we really want to hear from you guys.

Speaker 3: 35:50

Yeah, why not Are they say it Viva la revolution.

Speaker 2: 35:57

My friends is rusty.

Speaker 3: 36:00

The only other thing I would tap on is if you happen to be listening and are currently Experiencing any of what we've we've discussed, or have experience, first thing you need to do is call them out on their shit. Tell a boss, tell, tell leader, hr, your patient, advocate, chief nurse, tell your mama, I don't know, tell somebody so that you can get out of that situation and that behavior can be addressed, because you don't deserve that and it's not healthy. Say something and, even if it's not happening to you directly and you see it happening in your work section, grow a pair and say something, please, and then write in and tell us about it.

Speaker 2: 36:42

Yeah, and if it's happening, you know, if you have a patient encounter because it happens, you know Please make sure you do your best to keep yourself safe first. If you're a co-worker and you're seeing it, protect your co-workers, because it's not going to do any good to have a harmed or worse co-worker. Yeah, they have to be protected and we have to do better at this, and we're in a very critical situation right now. I think I saw some research that was saying that between now and 2030 now, that's only seven years away we are at risk being at a half million short in healthcare workers if that doesn't terrify you, it should.

Speaker 3: 37:30

Yeah, it should it should.

Speaker 2: 37:32

That's what we got for today. So if you're advocating and you want to get the word out Because apparently we need a hell of a lot more public awareness, so let's do it then let us know. We are all about having a good conversation and we'd like to get gritty. We're not here for your proper CEU presentation. We want to know the real deal, and that includes if you swear. We're fine with that too.

Speaker 3: 38:02

Don't worry, I have a stack of but what do they call them? Hurt feeling reports? Oh yes, we stopped using those, so I forgot what they were called for a minute hurt feeling Reports.

Speaker 2: 38:10

Yes, we hope you guys have an awesome, awesome week and peace out. Bye, guys, oh. Oh, oh.